Date: 18 Aug 2006 13:21:47
From: William C. Keel
Subject: Uranian moons - transits and eclipses
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While checking the IDs of a couple of Uranus' moons on a recent
image, I noticed that we now see the system nearly enough edge-on
to allow transits and occultations of its (large) moons. This
could pose some interesting challenges to imagers out there.
I have yet to verify how far from the limb one of the moons
could go into shadow. Their shadows on the cloudtops would
be at best around 0.1 arcsecond across, so capturing them
would be an even more interesting challenge (one I suspect
would work only because a resolution of several times that
still shows a reduce-contrast dark spot). There are two
ring-plane crossings next year, for which I see Hubble
campaigns are planned to look at the dust bands and shephard
moons. After that, it will be something like 2039 for the
next chance.
Bill Keel
(IAU member, not quite nearing 60 but not in Prague)
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