Via the Lunar Picture of the Day comes this astonishing image from Peter Lawrence, an accomplished astrophotographer:
The Moon passed in front of Saturn as seen from England the other day, and Peter was on it. It was what’s called a "grazing occultation", since Saturn wasn’t completely eclipsed by the Moon. For my money it’s cooler than a full-on occultation! Peter took a series of images and superposed them to get this shot.
FYI, the Moon doesn’t pass directly in front of the planets very often, though it’s not what I would call really rare. The planets orbit the Sun in roughly (but not exactly) the same plane, and the Moon is a close to that plane as well — but again, not exactly on it. So we don’t get occultations like this every month, but they do happen. Aren’t they wonderful?
Give Peter’s site a tour. You’ll be amazed at what he has done.
March 5th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Wow, that’s awesome!
The relative sizes are throwing me for a loop, though. Man, that doesn’t look real.
March 5th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
The BA says: “The planets orbit the Sun in roughly (but not exactly) the same planet,…”
I think you mean “plane” there.
Another sock-knocker-offer! There’s an optical illusion (at least for me) that makes it look like the string of Saturns have a curvature away from the moon, but holding a straightedge up to my monitor proves otherwise.
- Jack
March 5th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
What is the time difference between the first and last picture?
And how do you orbit “in roughly the same planet”?
March 5th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
That’s not a composite image. What he did was make a very precise measurement of Saturn’s momentum, making its spatial position highly indeterminate.
March 5th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
Aha. This may be why the ISP I was using in Ireland last year blocked the BA page on account of it being ‘occult’. It could have picked up on the word ‘occultation’.
BTW, thanks to the BA again for helping out with that.
March 5th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
Holy cow! I’m totally blow away by the relative apparent _size_ of Saturn next to the moon in the image. From intuition alone, I would have imagined it as more of a tiny speck next to the moon, given the distance. That’s incredible! My intuition was waaaay off. My mental model is now slightly better calibrated to reality because of this image. Thanks!
March 5th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
It doesn’t surprise me as much, the moon is really fairly small in the sky despite how we perceive it.
March 5th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
I figured the moon was coming close to Saturn, but I didn’t imagine this!
Very cool!
March 5th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
“The Moon passed in front of Saturn as seen from England the other day, and Peter was on it. ”
So much for the moon hoaxies’ (hoaxers?) claim man hasn’t returned to moon for decades.
March 5th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
um. “the moon”. always read your post before you compulsively hit submit, i guess
March 5th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
Anyone know how many grazing occultations involving moon/planet there have been since, um, when we can start counting?
March 5th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
There was a similar series shown in National Geographic (1974 maybe?) Full occultation though. Possibly elsewhere. I did cut it out and made a flip book of it. That is much cooler. I’m glad there are hobbiest out there to bring it home!
March 5th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
While we were visiting the moon did the astronauts make any observations of other planets in the solar system?
March 5th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
Actually, all the eclipse talk lately brings up a point that might be interesting for a Q&BA. We know that a number of ancient civilisations were able to predict the positions of the stars and planets with great accuracy, but what about eclipses? It seems to me that predicting the recurrence of eclipses would be pretty difficult without developing a Copernican cosmology, but then again that just might be arrogant 21st Century me looking back with 20/20 hindsight. Were there any ancient civilisations that were able to predict solar and lunar eclipses?
March 5th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
Eclipses can be predicted w/o Copernican cosmology, but it’s REALLY, REALLY difficult, which is one reason the heliocentric theory caught on, because it explained what we were seeing and allowed us to calculate the positions of planets, etc, much more easily. I’ve always thought the main reason we progress is because we’re basically lazy,,,well, I am,,,
Again, Relativity can make many of the calculations needed to explain what we see on a sub-atomic level just as accurately as quantum mechanics, it’s just incredibly akward and time consuming.
So, we look for theories that are more “elegant” in their application, ie, beautiful in their simplicity, and easy to use,,,
Yeah, we’re definetly lazy,,,but, ya know, whatever works,,
Gary 7
March 5th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
Hi Rosemary,
While on the Moon the astronauts’ principle agenda was geology, for study of the Moon itself. That’s the one thing which they could do better on the lunar surface than anything else. The Moon isn’t significantly closer or farther from the other planets than is Earth, so Earthbound astronomers, with their large telescopes, were in a better position for planetary observations than the Apollo crews.
March 5th, 2007 at 7:21 pm
Mark Martin Says: “While on the Moon the astronauts’ principle agenda was geology, for study of the Moon itself.”
Uh, I think that’s “selenology.” They’d have to wait until they got back to do “geology.”
Pedantically yours,
- Jack
March 5th, 2007 at 8:07 pm
Here he is on the BBC. “The Sky at Night” still hosted by Patrick Moore who covered the Moon landings and says, in a piece in the companion magazine of the series, that he talked to one of the Wright Brothers (!) … presumably some time ago…lol!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/spaceguide/skyatnight/proginfo.shtml
DJBarney
BTW.. I used to live in Pete Lawrences home town…Selsey, many years ago.
March 5th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
Wait a mo. we’re missing something important here …
Oh yes, that was it, did Christian really say that his old Irish ISP blocks _occult_ web
sites???
March 6th, 2007 at 1:41 am
Hey, Nanny Filters are an endless source of amusement.
I’ve been blocked from a page on a news site because it discussed gays! The headline was something like “IBM tops poll of best places to work if you’re gay.”
A friend of mine once tried to warn her other friends about the infamous “Melissa” virus, only to have her warning blocked because it contained the word “virus” in it!
But apart from mis-identifying the BA (as well as potentially a lot of medical sites, as “occult” is also used in medical jargon), the religious arrogance of that ISP is staggering.
Oh! I just got your pun! (I’m a bit slow.:-))
March 6th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Rosemary wonders whether Apollo astronauts did any observations of other planets while on the Moon. I haven’t checked about extensive scientific observations or experiments, but here is a picture showing planet Mercury: NASA image AS15-98-13311, “Solar corona photographed from Apollo 15 one minute prior to sunrise” – http://www.apolloexplorer.co.uk/photo/html/as15/10075726.htm
March 6th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
I don’t understand why Saturn would appear to be interestingly bigger seen from near the moon than it appears from earth. It should be only trivially closer in the best case. Is this an artifact of the way magnification works with this telescope, in that the relative sizes are not actually the same as if I was that apparent distance from the moon?
March 6th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
BMurray,
You’re right that were you to travel the 1/4-million miles to the Moon the percent change in your distance to Saturn would be too small to be important. But the telescope doesn’t simulate a translation through space. It magnifies everything in its field of view by the same factor. It increases their angular diameters. So, given that to the naked eye on Earth the Moon occupies an angle of about 1/2 degree, and Saturn occupies an angle so small that it appears as only a bright spot, if the telescope magnifies Saturn’s angular size enough to resolve into a disc with rings, then the Moon magnified by the same factor will assume a positively huge angle, as it does in the above photo.
March 6th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
I don’t get what people think is so mysterious? Yes, Saturn looks big. But then, you’re only seeing a segment of the Moon in that image – so the Moon looks pretty darn huge, too. We’re seeing an est 45 degree arc segment of the Lunar silhouette, with the center point offset to the bottom of the image. I see an ~30cm diam Moon with a .5 cm diam Saturn (no rings). No size disparity apparent to me.
TheBlackCat said:
> What is the time difference between the first and last picture?
I guess you missed the posted *LINK*
Gary Ansorge said:
> Again, Relativity can make many of the calculations needed to explain what we see on a sub-atomic level just as accurately as quantum mechanics, it’s just incredibly akward and time consuming.
Uh, I don’t think they deal with the same aspects of physics. Got something I can read on that?
March 6th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Special relativity & quantum mechanics aren’t alternative (competing) physical theories. Relativity alone can not be made to forecast the results of quantal experiments, not even “awkwardly”. In fact, it’s necessary to unify special relativity into quantum mechanics (Dirac theory) in order to generalize QM. They’re definitely not competing theories; they’re more like partners.
March 6th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
WHAT ABOUT A COMBINED PLANETARY OCCULTATION AND LUNAR ECLIPSE??? The other day I watched as a star popped out from behind the moon on the opposite side from the edge of the moon growing in light as the earth’s shadow left it. Would there be any way to calculate when (past or future) we would have BOTH a planetary occultation and eclipse simultaneously?
March 6th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
Sure, such a combo can be calculated. Such events are figured out routinely. However, it’s not for the weak of heart!
March 6th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
How good is the photographer to get a balanced exposure between Saturn and the Lunar features, or is this image in fact a mosaic?
March 6th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
[...] – The Moon ate Saturn! “Via the Lunar Picture of the Day comes this astonishing image from Peter Lawrence, an [...]
March 7th, 2007 at 6:52 am
“We know that a number of ancient civilisations were able to predict the positions of the stars and planets with great accuracy, but what about eclipses? It seems to me that predicting the recurrence of eclipses would be pretty difficult without developing a Copernican cosmology, but then again that just might be arrogant 21st Century me looking back with 20/20 hindsight. Were there any ancient civilisations that were able to predict solar and lunar eclipses?”
I’m pretty sure that the ancient Greeks and Chinese were able to predict ecplipses, as well as medieval Muslims and Christians. Probably some other civilizations could as well – India, the Mayans, etc.
By the late 15th century Europeans had printed almanacs stating when eclipses would occur. There’s a story that Columbus, who got stranded on Jamaica during his 4th voyage, intimidated the Jamaican natives into providing him and his crew with food by predicting an eclipse of the moon based on an almanac that he was carrying.
March 7th, 2007 at 9:53 am
Dutchy, if you would read the link, or even my previous post, you would see it is a composite image.
March 7th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Thank you, Mark, that’s exactly what I thought was happening but your explanation was much clearer than the hand waving in my head.
May 25th, 2007 at 11:43 pm
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