Brunstein Observatory

Kreiensen, Germany


Uranus occultation on October 21 1999



 
Our team, consisting of Stefan Schwarzer, Rudolf A. Hillebrecht and me had a lot of luck on Tuesday, about that much as it is normally needed for a solar eclipse (why not this year?!). Exactly as it had been predicted by the weather service it cleared up about 2 hours before the event so that we had very good observing conditions in the southern part of Lower Saxony.

With Rudolf's motorhome, a C8 and an ST5 ccd camera we drove close to Friedland which was located in the partial occultation zone. There we build up our equipment about one hour before the great event, maybe a little short to get the technical equipment up and running perfectly, but we managed to be ready just in time. Therefore we still had a little chaos and the images are not perfect, but they are about the best we could get with the extremely unsteady air. Uranus was a very pleasant sight when it hurried closer to the dark limb of our moon.

Sadly we have only few images from the first part of the event. Then the planet grazed from the dark to the illuminated side of the moon where the contrast was a hard challenge to our ccd camera. Only when Uranus was left behind by the moon it was easily visible again.

Although not everything went in an optimal way we are still quite pleased and happy with our images, espacially as we managed to succesfully use the chance given by the weather...

And now here is our image:

Uranus occultation chart
 


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