I really haven’t been finding posting material recently, because I’ve had a lot of other things going on, though I have a few unrelated pics that may show up a little later. Right now, I’m providing what little warning I can, having discovered only this morning that the moon will be occulting Spica this evening.
Basic orbital dynamics: the stars move across the sky only because the Earth rotates, but the moon has its own orbit and thus moves slightly differently than the stars, which means from time to time it will block them. Actually, it blocks a lot of them, but it’s often bright enough that we can’t see the stars close to it anyway, so we notice nothing. In this case however, Spica is one of the brighter stars and will disappear against the half-moon’s darker side, at roughly 11:30 PM EDT.
If you’d like to see this for yourself. I’d highly recommend downloading Stellarium (which produced the screenshot above) and getting your location plotted and saved within; this will provide a much more accurate account of when and where it will occur for you (though you can probably figure out where easily enough by watching the moon.) I might endeavor to do this on video if Spica is bright enough to snag at the normal frame rate, which it may not be. But if the skies remain clear, I should have some still photos at least.
Spica will actually re-emerge from the other, sunlit side of the moon roughly 100 minutes later, but it will have set by then at this location. I played around with locations a bit, and determined that from Avon, NC – far out on the Outer Banks – there’s a slim chance that this could be seen just before it dips below the horizon, but this is close to a five hour drive from here and stands a very good chance of being obscured by atmospheric haze anyway, even if the sky is “clear,” so I won’t be making that attempt. Further west in the country, however, the re-emergence should be visible, so give it a shot if you like.