This year North Americans get many good ones. Even more satisfying is timing them accurately, which is simpler than many observers think. Very precise timings can be made of many occultations by pointing a camcorder into your telescope's eyepiece, and some stars are so bright that you don't even need the telescope. When the Moon is waning, the events on the bright and dark limbs are reversed. Reappearances are always tricky to time, regardless of whether they happen on the bright or dark limb, because you have to be steadily watching or recording the place on the Moon's limb where the star will pop out.
Low magnification helps if the star is bright.
Occultations of Aldebaran and stars near it in the Hyades remain the major events for North Americans in 1999. Aldebaran will not be occulted again until 2015. Some of these events can be watched with binoculars or even the naked eye. The tables and map here describe many of the outstanding occultations for the coming year. Tips Occultations timed to an accuracy of a few tenths of a second by simple, time-hallowed visual methods still have various scientific uses.