Introduction

Asteroidal occultations are very rare and few indeed have been observed throughout the whole of Europe. Nevertheless, it is important to keep monitoring these events.  Grazing occultations, when the star appears just to pass across the irregular edge of the moon, are a little more common and one or two normally occur within 50 miles of Crayford each year.  It is essential to obtain accurate timings of these occultation events from precisely known positions on the Earth's surface.

The Society is a member of the International Occultation Timing Association's European Section (IOTA-ES) which issues predictions of occultation of stars by asteroids and of grazing occultations by the Moon.  In addition, predictions of lunar occultations for individual observatories, are also distributed to interested members.

Society member Bert Carpenter directed these activities and organised the expeditions before his sad death in January 1998.  This involved not only selecting suitable sites but also determining precise locations from accurate maps well in advance of the event.  Bad weather and other factors can set all these efforts to nought, but several successful observations have been made and the results communicated to IOTA-ES to be later recorded in the annual report issued by the International Lunar Occultation Centre in Tokyo, Japan.

One outstanding effort was to observe the highly unusual grazing occultation of a star during a total lunar eclipse.  The graze line was near Worcester and Society members undertook the 250 mile round trip to join local Society representatives in recording the event as reported in Astronomy Now (see separate publication list).