See also my article on this event (in German) from Sternkieker 01/2000

On the 24 April 1999 a number of members of the GvA - Kiel spread out to observe the rare event of the occultation of a bright star by the moon. In this case this occultation happened to be at the limb of the moon. So if done in the right position, you will be able to see several occultations by mountains on the moons' limb and the start will reappear one or more times through the valleys on the moon.

Hubert Paulus has done a fine preparation with calculating the path, and a week before the event we fixed the places for the observation. This has been done with the help of GPS positioning. Five groups were placed along a line of about 5 kilometers. I had the center position #3, where I possibly could expect more than one event.

We had luck that night, as a thunderstorm made the big observation party near Luebeck impossible. We saw some incredible lightnings in the south. There were a number of clouds around, but in the right moment we had clear sky.

The action was a complete success. My machine ran perfect, and in a first check I saw already more than one occultation. I made no parallel visual observation.

All data have been collected and send a coordinator. First impressions show a good relation between our groups data and other observers data.

The following sequence is from the AVI file we made. This file has a size over 160 MByte.

Equipment

The equipment I used was my New Polaris Vixen mount with electric drive and my 1000mm f=1/10 Maksutov lens coupled to my Compro PS 39 WebCam I bought just a week before the event. I borrowed a Pentium 133 laptop computer to take the AVI video file with a webcam program.

Text and All Images are Copyright by Christoph Petermann DF9CY

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