{"id":38145,"date":"2025-01-12T22:46:27","date_gmt":"2025-01-13T03:46:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/?p=38145"},"modified":"2025-01-12T22:46:27","modified_gmt":"2025-01-13T03:46:27","slug":"edging-out-the-little-guy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/2025\/01\/edging-out-the-little-guy\/","title":{"rendered":"Edging out the little guy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomorrow night, a little after 9 PM EST (so 2 AM Jan 14 UTC – adjust as necessary,) the moon will occult Mars<\/a>, pretty directly for most of the US. This will last for a little over an hour before Mars reappears again out the other side, so this is an easy thing to spot by naked eye, and a good target for telephoto lenses, small and large telescopes.<\/p>\n

\"plot
Plot of Mars occultation by moon from Stellarium for this location – other regions will vary somewhat<\/figcaption><\/figure>
I keep making noises to this effect, and keep not doing it, but I really should get the telescope set up for this – it’s a good, easy target and we even have conditions tonight for a test run. It’s cold out there, and the scope is always a bitch to set up, align, collimate, and all that – I understand why people build backyard observatories. And ideally, I should have the tracking motor working, but last year’s attempts<\/a> to get this together for the solar eclipse produced almost nothing – it seemed to be working<\/em>, but not properly<\/em>, and I had no way of determining why not. In this case however, the target area will be broad enough that tracking may be unnecessary.<\/p>\n

The big caveat:<\/strong> the moon is a hell<\/em> of a lot brighter than Mars, and so an exposure to get good detail from both isn’t happening, but if you’re into astrophotography, you’re probably used to Photoshopping (I think they call it “image stacking,” but potato\/potato) to get an image that shows both, so have at it. I may do some experiments tonight to see what relative exposures are necessary. The moon is easy, but we can bleach that out a bit to capture Mars as it hides.<\/p>\n

If you haven’t done it yet, download Stellarium<\/a>, and get it set for your location. It’s really damn handy. And good luck!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomorrow night, a little after 9 PM EST (so 2 AM Jan 14 UTC – adjust as necessary,) the moon will occult Mars, pretty directly for most of the US. This will last for a little over an hour before Mars reappears again out the other side, so this is an easy thing to spot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,3],"tags":[773,7948,1600,189],"class_list":["post-38145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-photo","tag-mars","tag-mars-occultation","tag-moon","tag-night-sky-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38145\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}