This event goes local, through the Santa Cruz Mtns. It's part of a "2-fer" as Anahita occults a star just 80 minutes later. To see both, I'll need to be optimally at the top of Stage Rd near San Gregorio, CA up the coast. Closest place with good odds of seeing both. This Medea event is at only 22 degrees altitude, and at 13.0 magnitude, will require some integration to make sure and get. But it lasts 12.8 seconds which is quite a long time, so we should be able to get very good spatial resolution on the shape of this asteroid even with a bit of integration. The drop is 0.5 magnitude.
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Richard Nolthenius
I set up Kirk at the Verde Rd site north of Tunitas, as planned, and he got a good recording. I couldn't find my planned Higgins Cyn road site, getting fooled by thinking I was already too far north and as time got short, set up on Dehoff Cyn road, which was only half as far north of Kirk as I'd planned. I got solid recordings and good occultations of both targets. The Medea event was confusing on the chart. No question we had the right field, but the two faint 13th mag stars left of the target did not show up at any integration, and more suprising still, the 12.0 star immediately to the right of the target was also missing. Since the rest of the stars all matched the chart, we both just recorded and hoped for the best. However, because we weren't sure if perhaps the asteroid was what was very faint, we taped at 16x instead being better at 8x. I could see on the PyMovie reduction that the central pixel of my target was saturated or at least it was above level=196, which was decided to be the level to signal saturation (maybe should set to 256 = 16 bit for the future?). Perhaps the partial saturation was why the observed dip was determined to be 0.34 mag but the predicted dip was 0.5 mag.
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PyOTE log file Event duration 12.55s and S/N = 2.07
Got great data too.
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