Moon Occults Alcyone in the Pleiades
DATE: 2026-10-27 TIME: 20:00:00 to 21:30:00 EDT SCOPE: Celestron Omni AZ-102 + EQ5 EYEPIECES: - GSO SuperView 30mm - Tele Vue 32mm Plossl - Tele Vue 20mm Plossl - TMB Planetary II 8mm - Parks G.S. 2x Barlow TARGETS: - Moon - Pleiades (Alcyone) So good news! I found a hole in the clouds tonight, and I managed to watch the Moon exit the Pleiades. And the best part? I got to see Alcyone be occulted and reappear from behind the Moon. That's something I love to see - the Moon moving relative to background stars. It lets me see the motion of the Moon first hand. I was out there about an hour before the clouds came in. Such a good time! As for equipment, I used my Omni AZ-102 and started with the GSO SuperView 30mm - but the glare and scatter was pretty bad. Using the Tele Vue 32mm Plossl gave a narrower view, but the image was crystal clear. The best view of the night was through the Tele Vue 20mm Plossl which still gave a good overview of the scene - I could see the Moon and eight bright stars from the Pleiades. I also used the TMB Planetary 8mm to zero in on Mare Crisium which had some really favourable lighting. Finally, I wound up using my 2x Barlow with the TMB 8mm for 165x to really get in there and examine the craters on the terminator. Interesting fact - once I got observing, at no point did CA enter my mind. I'm sure it was in there somewhere, but even at 165x everything looked black and shades of gray - I saw no purple or green in any of the views. It was confirmation to me that I can run my 102mm achromat at full aperture pretty much all the time using the SV231 filter. I think the only object that will have a CA issue is likely Venus. Even then - we'll see! I focused on Mare Crisium because it looked a lot like Plato tonight - nice and dark floor (compared to the surrounding area) and I identified a lot of craterlets and features within it: - Picard - Peirce - Swift - Greaves - Lick - Yerkes - Cleomedes F - Eimmart C - Shapley Additionally I identified the following craters along the terminator: - Cleomedes - Burckhardt - Geminus - Bernoulli - Endymion - Langrenus - Vendelinus - Lohse - Petavius Overall it was a great night. I got to use my 20th Century Atlas Of The Moon to do all these identifications. It was a bit tough to figure out a workflow since I normally wear glasses to read but I don't generally wear them while observing. And guess what? Using progressive eye glasses at the telescope is bad idea! So I got out my readers (which have a constant prescription) and I had a red head lamp strapped to my head. The eye relief of the TMB 8mm + Barlow allowed me to look at the Moon through the eyepiece, then look immediately down at my atlas with my red headlight on and identify the craters. The only thing I had to do was flip the image in my mind - but after a few minutes that was like second nature. The clouds rolled in and chased me back inside - but I'm looking forward to my next observing session with our closest celestial neighbour!
