Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Occultation of Spica (early morning April 14)
Moon and Spica as seen from Darwin at midnight (click image to enlarge). The Moon will occult the bright star Spica (alpha Virginis, magnitude 1) on the early morning of April 14 (April 13 in India). This will be visible from Northern Australia (NT, Northern WA and North QLD), Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, South East Asia and India. Representative local times are given in the at the Southern Skywatch Occultation section (sorry, tables don't seem to work properly in Blogger). The IOTA Spica Occultation page gives a lot more cites, but in Universal time, so you have to do the conversions yourself.
The full moon will make viewing the dissapearance and reapearance of Spica hard to see with the unaided eye. This occultation is best viewed with binoculars or a small telescope. In locations outside the occulation track, Spica and the Moon will appear evry close togeher, and will be interesting to look at.
# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 7:35 am 
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