The Moon occults planet Uranus: a sequence – 5 Dec. 20022

Last night, the almost full Moon occulted planet Uranus. We could observe the start of the event, before clouds covered the sky. Here it is an interesting animation.

The Moon occults planet Uranus: 5 Dec. 2022.

I managed to capture a sequence of images around the ingress time, remotely taken with the “Elena” (PlaneWave 17″ + Paramount ME + SBIG STL-6303E) robotic unit available at Virtual Telescope. I had to use a H-alpha filter, to dramatically reduce the brightness of the Moon (millions of times brighter that Uranus).

As we can see, at some point Uranus disappears behind the dark lunar limb, starting the occultation. We could not observe the egress of the planet, at the end, because of the clouds.It was a very difficult observation, because of the hazy sky and the very bright Moon.

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