Predicting Local Circumstances of Lunar Occultations

Predict the local circumstances (topocentric azimuth and elevation) of lunar occultations of a planet or star.

This submission is a MATLAB script named lunar_occult that can be used to predict the local circumstances of lunar occultations of a planet or star. These circumstances consist of the Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) at the beginning and end of the occultation along with the topocentric (observer-centered) azimuth and elevation coordinates of the Moon at each event. The lunar and planetary source ephemeris for this script is a JPL binary ephemeris file.

This application uses several functions ported to MATLAB from the Fortran version of the NOVAS (Naval Observatory Vector Astrometry Subroutines) source code developed at the United States Naval Observatory. Information about NOVAS can be found at https://aa.usno.navy.mil/software/novas_info.

The lunar_occult MATLAB script also uses routines from the MICE software suite to read and evaluate the JPL de430.bsp binary ephemeris file. Other JPL ephemeris files, platform dependent versions of the MICE mex file, and other useful MATLAB astrometry functions are available at naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/toolkit_MATLAB.html. MICE is a MATLAB implementation of the SPICE library created by JPL.