Planetary occultations of naked eye stars have got to be one of the rarest celestial events. I had forgotten just how bad the ‘seeing’ was in my pre-dawn sky, but captured Lambda Aquarii emerging from the dark side of Venus this morning.

I’d been hoping to post a nice light curve of brightening as the star popped through the atmosphere, but the bad conditions made the video a little wild!

Very beautiful in its own way…