Occultation – Constitution Hill Observatory

After the Saturn occultation of May 2014 I was excited about the prospect of seeing another so soon. The weather during the day was perfect but it wasn’t until I got off the train later that evening that I notice quite a bit of cloud cover and the prospects didn’t look good. I started setting up though just in case the skies had cleared. I popped my head out every 20-30 mins in the lead up to first contact and with a few minutes to go the clouds had parted. This gave me a couple of minutes to align the scope for visual observation only. It was a spectacular site as the shadowed side of the moon started passing in front of Saturn. Once Saturn had fully disappeared, which took no time at all, I setup the scope with the webcam and waited for it to reappear on the other side approximately 50 minutes later.

Here are some pictures that I took of the setup on the night. Once again such a pleasure to see this rare astronomical event.

Here are some pictures of the setup on the night.

2014 is a great year for observations of objects in the solar system. There ends up being 3 occultations of the Saturn by the Moon. This was the first time that I had observed one through a telescope. The night was perfectly clear and so I headed home early to setup and get ready. It ended up being the first time that I was setup to take photos through prime focus so was a little uncertain how my images were going to turn out.

I knew that trying to take photos using the same shutter speed with the different brightness levels between the full Moon and that of dimmly lit Saturn would end in disaster. So after experimenting I found a balance between the two and was going to alternate between the two so that I could create a composite imagery/video.

System setup for the night is as follows :