Early Tuesday morning, the moon's ever eastward trek will take it across Antares, the brightest star in Scorpius. If you've never seen an occultation of a bright star by the moon, this is very interesting to watch.

The downside of this event will be the time when it happens. Antares will be right on the moon's edge a couple of minutes before 3:00am. It will fade out of sight very quickly a few minutes later, and then will reappear on the other side of the moon about 70-75 minutes later not long before dawn.

This will be a good opportunity to take some pictures of the event. If anyone has the desire and fortitude to setup and image, or even to view this event, please send me your reports and/or images and I'll post them for you. As I said, if you've never seen an event such as this before, it's quite interesting to watch the edge of the moon slowly plodding along in it's path, closer and closer to the star until it suddenly touches the moon's edge, when suddenly, it's gone. Anticipation grows as the moment of the reappearance of the star is awaited, you carefully watch the edge where you think it should return from, and just as suddenly as it disappears, there it is again!

For anyone interested in trying to view this event, I think you'll feel the tempered excitement as Antares does it's disappearing act and roughly an hour-and-ten minutes later, blinks back into view. Good luck, and please let me know how you did!

Well it looks like the weather will cooperate with us, so I hope I can get some decent pictures. I'll email them to you if they come out good.