On the evening of Feb 5th, 2017 (after the Super Bowl), I met up with other members of the Raleigh Astronomy to try to capture a really cool phenomenon, a Grazing Lunar Occultation – where the limb of the moon barely obscures a star in the back ground. While the occultation is taking place, the star peaks thru the valleys of the lunar mountains on the edge of our view of the moon. Unfortunately, I was not able to capture the graze as my field of view was not wide enough to locate the star before the event began.
However, I did capture some nice views of the moon using my Celestron CPC 1100 and Astro Video Systems MK-IV video astronomy camera with no focal reducers.
The moon was approximately 69% illuminated. I estimate the magnification at somewhere just above 400x which in retrospect was way too much. My skies in North Carolina can rarely support much over 200x or 250x which explains the rather turbulent seeing as viewing in the video.
Enjoy!
