On Wednesday July 26 UT Charon will occult a 13th magnitude star. The last available prediction by Michael Person (July 6) shows the shadow of Charon sweeping across the Earth south of both Australia and New Zealand. However Jay Pasachoff notes that the prediction contains a significant uncertainty in the Charon ephemeris and - based on the successful June 12 observation of an occultation by Pluto - if that uncertainty were to resolve in the same distance/direction offset as for Pluto, it would in fact be over the Australian continent. Currently, using the JPL ephemeris raw, it's south of all the telescopes.

Additional details are available here:

http://occult.mit.edu/research/occultations/Charon/C395.html

Note that this event will only be visible using large telescopes and very sensitive recording equipment.

For further information contact Jim Elliot via the link above.

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