The Moon will occult (hide) Neptune tomorrow, Sep. 28 (around 17 hours Universal Time, which, by clocks still on distorted summer time, is 6 or more hours earlier in North America). But it’s a grazing spectacle for penguins near the south pole, as shown by this diagram from the “Occultations” section of Astronomical Calendar 2023
The circles are Neptune’s Moon-shadow (from within which it cannot be seen) at 10-minute intervals. The side diagram shows Neptune passing the Moon, as seen from the center of the Earth.
The Moon, though glaring (full next day), could serve as a guide to start hunting with optical aid – and the Neptune chart on page 125 of your Astronomical Calendar 2023) for the dim planet. Neptune is at magnitude 7.8, well below naked-eye visibility.
“Everyone’s talking and no one’s listening”
quoth my friend Ian Dicks, cartoonist for the Financial Times. He referred to social media.
I have to admit that I sometimes wish it were confined to email, which can get complex enough; and the only other such medium I dip into is Facebook. I don’t post photographs or narratives of what I had for breakfast, but drawings and paintings out of my numerous sketchbooks. So by now if you go to https://www.facebook.com/guy.ottewell there are at least 153 samples of my smaller-sized art, I didn’t finish scrolling down through them.
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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
Actually, in the United States, *4* or more hours earlier on Distorted Summer Time. But if you include the rest of North America, as little as *2* hours earlier, in Saint Pierre and Miquelon and most of Greenland. I knew about Atlantic Time but not about the two more earlier time zones in Canada: Newfoundland Time is 3.5/2.5 hours earlier, and I don’t even know what the 3/2 hours earlier time zone for the French Islands and most of Greenland is called.
Groan, I should make myself write a program to answer the question “X UT is what by current clock time in Y time zone on YMD calendar date?”