2015 Grazing Occultation Highlights in the Middle East

JOURNAL OF OCCULTATION AND ECLIPSE (JOE); ISSN 2522-7955; No. 1, 2014

E. Riedel¹

¹International Occultation Timing Association in Eroupian Section (IOTA/ES), Germany; e_riedel@msn.com

Abstract

The following lists and tables show grazing occultation events of the brightest stars for Iran, Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia. The limiting stellar magnitude is 7.0 thus observations with smaller amateur telescopes up to 20 cm aperture are possible. The lines drawn in the maps show the northern or southern path limits of the lunar shadow for the mean lunar diameter. Observers standing in any place on such a line at the right time can witness the moon passing closely by the star. The libration depending true lunar limb terrain often leads to multiple occultations within a few minutes. The limb profiles shown here are based on high resolution lunar laser ranging measurements by the Japanese Kaguya spacecraft. For the use in the author’s GRAZPREP-software which is the source of all pictures in this article the data was restructured and recalculated for the profile aspect by the German amateur Dietmar Buettner.

Keywords: Grazing Occultation - GRAZPREP