Caoimhín's Content

Today we are looking into the future to check out an event that was suggested by a commenter. We’re just jumping a couple of decades into the future, to 2050, and we are looking at the 21st of August, so we don’t need to worry too much about the date. I have been suggested a particular location to view this event from, and we are going to be looking at the Moon, but before we take a look at this event from the suggested location, let’s just see if we can see anything from here in Ireland. From here it looks like we’re getting a Crescent Moon very near to Venus in the sky as it is setting, that’s just about all we’re getting from here in Ireland on this date from the moment the Moon rises, but that’s okay.

I was told to look from a specific location and at a specific time, so hopefully the time that I was given was the local time and I won’t need to convert it from UTC. We are going to the southern hemisphere, though not particularly far into the southern hemisphere, and we are in the eastern hemisphere as well. It appears that we are on the East African Coast, around the border between Kenya and Tanzania. We’ll get as close as possible to the exact location of 4 degrees south and 38 degrees, 53 minutes east. We don’t need to worry about seconds of arc, when it comes to minutes and seconds of arc, especially the seconds of arc, we’re already looking at very specific locations. Degrees of longitude and latitude are quite big, but once we get down to minutes and seconds, they cover smaller areas.

Late in the evening we have the Mars and Saturn in the sky. Let’s move forward to sunrise on the 21st. We’re looking at a very narrow crescent Moon so it’s not going to be too far from the Sun and I do believe it was 7pm that I was told to look for the Moon, but we’ll follow it from when it rises. Here we go, the Moon rises a little after the Sun, we’ll move through time to catch the Moon and Venus really close together, and then what appears to be an occultation of Venus by the Moon. It’s not quite a true occultation, but I think that this might be even nicer. With the Moon as a crescent, all of the cracks and craters of the Moon are visible. Venus is visible with the Moon very clearly right next to it. Their apparent approach is very close, with Venus just skimming the terminator of the Moon just as the sky gets dark from pretty close to the equator.

Let’s take a look and see how that would appear through a telescope Telescopes and binoculars are going to limit your field of view, so you won’t be able to see as much at the same time. With a very big telescope and with plenty of help from eyepieces, Venus is visible as a half, along with the craters on the Moon’s surface. That is an amazing view that’s coming up in 2050. It’s especially nice to catch the terminator of the Moon, the boundary between day and night where we can see all of the shadows of the cracks and the craters. Seeing that with Venus is amazing, but I am going to be greedy and see if I can fiddle around with the location, to see if I can put Venus behind the Moon. When messing around with these things you do need to be very, very precise, there’s only so much change you can get with parallax, there’s only so much difference that changing location is going to make. Moving just a little bit further south and we are getting something, Venus does go behind the Moon. Let’s see if we can watch this occultation happening because it is now a true occultation. First Venus comes in, slips behind the Moon and then emerges out the other side. I only had to change the location by just a couple of minutes of arc, that is enough to get the occultation of Venus.

The occultation of Venus is very nice, but the close approach, especially given that we have the half Venus, a not-Full Venus with the not-Full Moon as well, I think that almost makes it a little bit more impressive being able to see Venus and the Moon together at the same time. They are both in a different phase, but both in a phase, a Half Venus and a Crescent Moon, facing down towards the Sun. It’s visible there nice and high in the evening sky just a little after 7 o’clock from this location. Just to double check, we’ll take a look at the map, and we’re down at the coast, Africa, very close to the equator, on the coast of the Indian Ocean. That is the location to see this, if you’re going to be waiting for 2050, if you are going to be holding out for this particular event, it is going to take a while, but it is happening on this date in the far future. While we’re here, I’ll see if it is visible from a broader range of locations, or at least if something similar visible from a broader range of locations. We’ll hop around a little bit more roughly, rather than simply changing the numbers of latitude and longitude.

There are some locations where the end of the occultation is visible, with Venus really behind the Moon. However, trying to see the start moves us back into daytime there. I definitely understand why the commenter suggested the location that they did, from other places this event begins during the day when Venus wouldn’t be visible. Once the sky gets dark, Venus emerges out the other side of the Moon. That will still look really impressive as Venus emerges from being occulted by the Moon. If you have a powerful enough telescope, you can take a closer look at Venus pushing out from just behind the Moon. It is very clear, and of course, Venus is big enough and bright enough to be visible as a small dot even to the naked eye. If we’re taking a look at the Moon with a much smaller telescope with a wider field of view, we won’t see Venus as a half but we’ll see the whole Moon and Venus. If we move back in time the sky gets brighter for daytime, but moving forward, Venus is definitely visible as a very bright object emerging from behind the Moon, and it doesn’t take too long to happen.

Even moving forward at real speed here, Venus is going to emerge from behind the Moon fairly quickly over the course of just a few minutes. We’ll pull back until there’s just a little bit of light from Venus peeking out from being the Moon, just as we come up to 7 o’clock. We can see Venus fully emerging over the course of about three minutes. So as long as you start close enough to Venus emerging, it’ll only take about three to five minutes for Venus to pop out, which is a realistic amount of time to wai, looking at the Moon through a telescope. Thanks to the position of the terminator on the Earth, thanks to where the Sun is shining, as we move around we may move into daytime. Many positions with a good view of the end are also position where the beginning would be obscured by the light of the day. We definitely can’t see Venus when the sky is that bright, but we can still see Venus emerging from the bottom of the Moon once the sky darkens.

It looks like a good portion of southeastern to eastern coastal Africa is going to be able to see this particular occultation of Venus by the Moon, but it does look like the location we started at may be best. The location we started out at, where Venus simply skims the Moon without actually touching down completely, that is a pretty nice view. Hopefully in 2050, we all remember to get our cameras ready and take a trip to Africa to see this. I hope that you enjoyed this description of it here. If you did enjoy this piece then please do like it. If you like this kind of content, then please subscribe to this website and my YouTube channel. Thank you very much for reading, and hopefully I’ll see you back here next time.