Strangely Astromist on my Pocket PC failed to predict it, but Calsky did with great precision -- the emergence of Europa from Jupiter's shadow. I don't recall having witnessed this common event before from start to finish. Jupiter was quite low in the sky, over an apartment building in terrible seeing. The ending of the eclipse of Europa appeared to take half a minute or so, from a very faint point of light to sixth magnitude. The Great Red Spot was supposed to be crossing Jupiter's face at that time, but I couldn't make it out. A 15mm Super Plossl was the maximum the planet could sustain.
Sunspot 1029, unusually large and just unusual for being a spot on a normally -- these days -- spotless sun, was very prominent near the western limb close to sunset. This is my mirror image sketch, drawn around 0800 gmt on Oct 29 using a 15mm Super Plossl.
I got my directions mixed up until I found this useful explanation of how it works from http://the-moon.wikispaces.com/IAU+directions:
Like the Moon, early maps of the Sun were drawn with the limbs marked according to which horizon on Earth they faced (or, equivalently, their directions on the celestial sphere. The convention for solar mapping has never been changed: professional astronomers continue to describe active regions on the Sun as appearing on the "east" limb, rotating across the Sun's face, and disappear over the "west" limb. But this means they are moving from the Earth's east to the Earth's west. And following a tradition dating back to the 1850's, longitudes on the Sun are numbered (as they still are on the Moon) increasingly positive towards the Earth's western horizon (although a full 0 to 360° system is used). Since the 1961 change in the lunar mapping convention, the Sun is the only solar system body for which a north-up map will have "east" on the left.
A hazy night with thin cloud, with the moon and nearby Jupiter all I could see. Attached is a sketch of the moon's southern limb drawn between 1300 and 1400 gmt on Oct 27. The large crater at the bottom is Clavius (last sketched a couple of years ago, see http://www.astronomyblogs.com/member/northandeast/?xjMsgID=37697). The other large features are Crater Maginus, above and to the left of Clavius, and Tycho with its prominent central mountain at the top.
... will be less than three degrees apart in the evening of Tuesday Oct 27 in northern China.
Set out to observe the end of an occultation of Io by Jupiter, which my Astromist software said would occur at 7:15pm. The time went by and no moon appeared. An hour later there was still no sign of it, even though my TheSky6 software suggested it should have been further from Jupiter by then -- and brighter -- than Europa which was clearly visible on the other side. Then finally after looking up at the sky and then back into the eyepiece, there it was -- well separated from Jupiter. It had of course remained in eclipse after the end of its occultation. Half an hour later I saw Europa being covered by the planet, disappearing (to my eye, in poor seeing) less than a minute before the advertised time on Calsky. Above is a sketch I made during the eclipse of Io.
