On Tuesday, Feb. 23, as the sky grows dark the moon will pass in front of and occult the star kappa Gemini. This is a somewhat bright 3.5 magnitude star, and one of the brightest the moon will occult this year. The occultation will happen early in the evening as the sky is just beginning to grow dark. The star is going to barely pass behind the moon’s north pole. In fact, if you live in northern Arkansas you’ll see a very narrow miss. The farther south you are the longer the star will be behind the moon. Thus, the timing of the event is very dependent on your location. For most of central and southern Arkansas you’ll want to begin watching by 6pm and it’ll finish by 6:30pm. You will need a good pair of binoculars or a small telescope to watch this event. The image shows the moon around 6pm, as seen from central Arkansas, along with the path it will take behind the moon.
A New Site!
Unfortunately a fatal error occurred in the database that controlled this website. This led to a hard decision. Restore from a backup and continue as normal, or start from scratch and rebuild.
The code that ran the website had been updated time and again over the years and this resulted in old, unwanted code building up in the pages. In turn this was bogging down the site, making it slow and unresponsive. So I made the decision to start over fresh. It will take time to re-build all the resources, but the results will be a new look and better user experience.
Thank you!