Just like Ramadan 2019 Moon Sighting was fraught with false claims of sighting the crescent, which the courts in Saudi Arabia took at face value without basic confirmation against astronomy.

It seems that Ramadan 2020 is also set to suffer from the same faults.

If you look at this screen capture from Stellarium, a free astronomical planetarium program, you will see sunset on Wednesday the 22nd of April 2020, near Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.

Here is a time lapse sequence of Comet C/2018 N2 (ASSASN).

This comet was discovered by the All-Sky Automated Survey For Supernovae (ASSASN) using software to analyze the images from one night to the next, and detect anything that is not a star.

The sequence was made on October 8th, 2019, between 1:35 am and 2:11 am while the comet was near the Triangulum constellation, and the M33 galaxy.

For this year's Eid Al-Fitr 1440 A.H. (2019 C.E.), the Muslim world had some countries, as well as some masjids in the West, ending the Ramadan fast on Tuesday. In Kitchener/Waterloo, we had the Kitchener mosque, following astronomical calculations, end the fast on Monday, while the Waterloo Masjid, following sighting, ended it on Tuesday.

Seeing the Unseeable

The problem here is that it was astronomically impossible to sight the new moon on Monday, since it is not illuminated at all.

This is a short video demonstrating how to use a Hall Effect sensor and a magnet to implement Periodic Error Correction (PEC).

Here is an example on eBay for a standalone 3144 Hall Effect Sensor. And here are the small neodymium magnets.

This is a composite video of Comet 46/P Wirtanen done from 41 exposures of 30 seconds each.

They were taken on 2019-12-19, using a Vixen SXD mount converted to OnStep, a Celestron C8 with 0.6X reducer, and a Canon T4i DSLR. You can see the comet racing against the background stars.