Astronomers to gather in New Zealand for rare glimpse of Pluto

Scientists from around the world will converge on a remote area of New Zealand's South Island next week for a rare and very brief glimpse of the farthest edges of our solar system.

The scientists are hoping for a 90-second glimpse of Pluto during a stellar occultation a rare event when light from a star is blocked by a planet much like a solar or lunar eclipse, said the government's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) on Wednesday.

The occurrence would be visible only through powerful telescopes, and the NIWA observatory in the central Otago region offered the best chance of seeing it.

NIWA's atmospheric research station at Lauder was renowned for its clear skies, NIWA atmospheric scientist Dr Richard Querel said in a statement.

As the star shone its light through Pluto's atmosphere, it would enable spectroscopic measurements to be made, allowing its atmosphere to be probed and studied, he said.

"This is a pretty rare event for Pluto the last one where some significant discoveries were made was about 10 years ago. It was around that time that a couple of new moons were discovered near Pluto that weren't known about before," said Querel.

Scientists were particularly interested in this stellar occultation because it would occur just two weeks before NASA's spaceship, New Horizons, fly past Pluto collecting data and images that have never been gathered so close before.

Comparisons would then be made between the ground-based and satellite observations.

Several groups of scientists from the U.S. and Europe were coming to observe the occultation, which was expected at about 5 a. m. local time on Tuesday.

They would bring two 14-inch portable telescopes with infrared and visible wavelength cameras, while a Spanish-operated telescope installed at Lauder would also be used to observe the event. Endi