iapetus saturn eclipse forwarded from john spencer spencer lowell edu there will be two eclipses of iapetus by saturn and its rings in may and july please spread the word here s some information about the events and then a couple of messages from jay goguen of jpl appealing for thermal observations of the eclipse to learn more about the thermal properties of iapetus he might also have some money available john spencer iapetus will be eclipsed by the shadows of saturn s rings and saturn itself on ut and again on ut timing is as follows may a ring ingress egress b ring ingress egress c ring egress saturn ingress egress b ring ingress egress a ring ingress egress july saturn ingress egress a ring ingress grazing egress times could be minutes later according to an alternate ephemeris and photometric observations are important for refining iapetus orbit because the sun s size projected on the rings as seen from iapetus is km it s unlikely that we will learn anything new about the rings themselves from the observations see soma astronomy and astrophysics l l for more details thanks to andy odell of northern arizona university for bringing the events to my attention thermal observations jay goguen jdg scn jpl nasa gov writes to me the interesting thing to do would be thermal ir of the july disappearance into the shadow of the planet to measure thermal inertia etc unfortunately the ut of this event renders it inaccessible except from russia even from calar alto saturn is rising through airmasses at ut do you know anyone in russia or ukraine with a big telescope and um instrumentation that s looking for something to do i d be willing to make a personal grant of for the data jay and again please try to encourage anyone that can observe the iapetus planet disappearance to do so at thermal wavelengths my impression would be that it s not an easy observation iapetus will be faint and getting fainter in eclipse so you ll need a big telescope that s a good ir telescope and reasonable um instrumentation i don t think that combination is widely available at the longitudes that are well placed for observation we need sofia for this one one possibility would be the ir telescope in india but it s only a m jay ron baalke baalke kelvin jpl nasa gov jet propulsion lab m s telos the aweto from new zealand pasadena ca is part caterpillar and part vegetable
