I had never managed to observe an occultation of the planet Mars before. So here was one. I set up my new camera with a 800mm lens and focused using the magnifier on the back of the camera. It was tracking the Moon on a SkyAdventurer Tracker. These shots turned out very good, but somehow the latter half of the occultation were out of focus, so those I do not include here. However I do include a couple of shots that I smashed together from the ingress shots based on the out of focus shots.

Clouds actually began moving in just before Mars re-emerged from behind the Moon, and was viewable for about 10 minutes before the cloud became too thick to view through. How did the camera go out of focus, I do not know. I had disabled the auto focus, did a precise manual focus on the Moon using the magnifying back. I did try adjusting the positioning of the camera slightly, but did not touch the focus at all. I will have to look up if there is a focus lock on this.

I did manage on doing a video as Mars reappeared with an 8-inch Celestron, which I still need to process.

The really cool thing is that the Moon was pretty much right on a Full Moon, and Mars was just a couple days past Opposition (meaning it is closest to the Earth for this cycle) with Mars being 17.1 seconds in diameter (about 8.4 seconds of arc smaller than the largest it can appear) and the brightest it can be for this opposition, at magnitude -1.99. It was 229,500,000 kilometers from the Earth.