Society for Popular Astronomy

28th December 2017, 1850- 1925 GMT;After observing Uranus from the garden, and then Mira (now bright), I turned the Acuter DS65 (with 32mm e.p. = 12x magnification) onto the nearby Gibbous Moon with terminator now beyond the Jura Mountains. Then I noticed a star, later identified as Xi (2) Ceti, lined up almost ready to be occulted by the dark limb of the Moon. I changed the eye-piece to a 20mm (= 19x) for the event. The star is of magnitude 4.3 and also listed as ZC 364. At about 1921 GMT, it snapped out as if it had been swtched off, behind the invisible lunar limb. A most pleasing observation.
(PS. I understand the ZC numbers -Zodiacal Catalogue numbers, but the star is also given a number in the XZ catalogue, as ZX 3322 - what is this?) regards maf

The catalogue designation you asked about is in the VizieR archives and was created (? ) by David Herald etc as a listing of stars that could be occulted by the moon at extremes ,some just outside the zodiacal band. More information here http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/Cat?I/201

Thank you. I will investigate further..... and have now had a look at the Internet link you mentioned. regards maf