Venus-Moon Occultation Observed by the Astronomical Institute of the Romanian Academy

On November 9, 2023, at 12:18 PM (Romania time), an occultation of the planet Venus by the Moon took place. The phenomenon had several particularities:

1. It occurred during the day, so the conditions for observation/photography were not ideal. Due to the daylight, the contrast of the Moon, which was in the last quarter of the daytime sky, was quite low.

2. The brightness of the planet Venus was more intense than that of the Moon, which made Venus extremely bright in the astrophotography frame compared to the adjacent surface of the Moon. The camera exposure time had to be reduced to 0.003 seconds to obtain an image of Venus that was not oversaturated, while still allowing the Moon to be visible in the footage.

3. From the observation point (the Solar Dome of the Bucharest Observatory of the Astronomical Institute of the Romanian Academy), the entry of Venus's disk behind the Moon was observed relatively easily, but the exit from behind the Moon was not observed because the Moon descended quite a bit and "hid" behind the branches of some trees in the park.

The observations were made using a Zeiss 120mm F/15 telescope, an ATIK 460 MM camera, and acquisition and preprocessing software - MaximDL.

The exposures were 0.003 seconds, and for calibration, bias and flat frames were used on the sky background. The interval between exposures was about 17 seconds at the beginning of the video and 7 seconds toward the end, when attempts were made to capture the ingress in as much detail as possible.

Download Links:
Fișier .gif cu ocultația Venus-Lună, exp. 0.003 s. (© AIRA, 2023)

Imagine de înaltă rezoluție cu ocultația Venus-Lună (© AIRA, 2023)

Published on: Nov 13, 2023