Mars Occultation

Vero Beach
No LL

The other night a spectacular full moon rose just after sunset. Right next to it was Mars. The light of the moon obscured all the other stars in that part of the sky, so that those two objects were the only thing visible.

As the night went on, we could see an interesting thing. Mars was catching up with the moon. We eventually went to bed and didn't actually see Mars disappear behind the moon, or to be occulted.



A careful observer could see this any night watching the moon occult stars. To a casual observer like myself though, the identity of individual stars near the moon is indistinct. The result is that I can see the moon move in it's orbit night to night, but within a single night it's motion relative to the stars is not apparent. This special occurrence of the occultation (boy what a tough word!) of Mars however made it easy because only Mars and the Moon were visible in that quarter of the sky.

What a delight it is to see more of the sky again, now that we live closer to nature and further away from bright lights. When I was a boy, I had great fun camping out with my friends. We would lay in our sleeping bags looking up at the sky and wondering at the things we could see. I'll never forget when we saw the Echo 1 Satellite. That was a spectacular sight.