Last night our beautiful still Full Snow Moon passed in front of the bright star Regulus -- the brightest star of the Constellation Leo the Lion.
Regulus (Alpha Leonis) is the 22nd brightest star in the night sky. Its a blue-white main-sequence star, also known as the "heart of the lion". As I've mentioned before on this site, Regulus may appear to be a single point of light, but its actually a quadruple star system composed of four stars that are organized into two pairs. This system lies approximately 79 light years (or 24.2 parsecs) from our Solar System.
Beginning about 9:00 p.m. EST here in North America, Luna passed in front of (or occulted) Regulus and -- for about a little under two hours -- replaced Regulus to become a part of the Constellation Leo!
I was able to capture three great shots of the occultation of Regulus by our beautifully still mostly full Luna: one before with both bodies shinning through the tree branches, the second during the occultation, and the last after the Moon's orbit eastward finally passed away from Regulus.
Unfortunately I was unable to capture all of the stars of the constellation due to the bright full moon's glare, but I was able to capture the two other bright stars of Leo: Denebola (Beta Leonis) the "lion's tail" and Algieba (Gamma Leonis) during the occultation of Regulus.
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