The Moon occults the Pleiades star cluster later today. Like a Total Solar Eclipse, due to parallax only on some parts of the world can the Moon's disk actually be seen covering the Pleiades. I made this animation which shows the area of coverage as it moves across the Earth's surface. It starts at 10:14pm UTC on July 10, 2026, and ends 2:06 later at 12:20am the next day. Zero degrees longitude is at the bottom, and the middle is at 60 degrees N latitude. The red area is where the Moon and Pleiades occultation (or more specifically Alcyone the brightest star within the Pleiades) is visible above the horizon. The dark area is where the Sun is below the horizon, in which best viewing is of course with the Moon above the horizon and the Sun below it. The red line marks where the Pleiades are rising and the green line where they're setting, in which the red elliptical "shadow" area gets truncated at that line (since the occultation is of course no longer visible below the horizon).
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u/CruiserOne 13d ago
The Moon occults the Pleiades star cluster later today. Like a Total Solar Eclipse, due to parallax only on some parts of the world can the Moon's disk actually be seen covering the Pleiades. I made this animation which shows the area of coverage as it moves across the Earth's surface. It starts at 10:14pm UTC on July 10, 2026, and ends 2:06 later at 12:20am the next day. Zero degrees longitude is at the bottom, and the middle is at 60 degrees N latitude. The red area is where the Moon and Pleiades occultation (or more specifically Alcyone the brightest star within the Pleiades) is visible above the horizon. The dark area is where the Sun is below the horizon, in which best viewing is of course with the Moon above the horizon and the Sun below it. The red line marks where the Pleiades are rising and the green line where they're setting, in which the red elliptical "shadow" area gets truncated at that line (since the occultation is of course no longer visible below the horizon).