* Allow plenty of time! I know every step easily by muscle memory. Still, if all goes well, it takes me 20 minutes from the time I turn off the car engine until I'm recording. If anything goes a little awry, easily 30-40 minutes. Kirk Bender's a pro, and he prefers a full hour to make sure in case anything goes wrong. For a beginner, I'd allow 1 hour minimum.
* Make sure your watch has accurate time, good to within a very few seconds of true time. On the web is NIST Time so you can accomplish that.
* Don't even start to set up until you can look up in the sky towards where you know the target is, and that it'll be in the clear at the time of the occultation. Remember that the stars rotate 15 degrees per hour from east to west, so allow for that.
* Set up the tripod, place the 1-arm mount on it, which is secured by 3 bolts permanently mounted in the bottom underside of the tripod head. They are normal right hand screws (ie they tighten going clockwise). Make sure it's snug enough not to have slop in the connection mount/tripod head.
* Now grab the tripod legs and make sure they are well grounded and not shifty like on pebbles or loose dirt or grass. You can't have any movement in your tripod legs after you've 2-star aligned. Be super vigilant you don't kick the tripod legs or you may have to start your alignment all over from scratch.
* Pull out telescope tube and cradle it in both arms, push the dovetail into the slot and tighten the dovetail hand screw on the bottom side of the dovetail slot. Make sure it's very snug before you un-cradle the tube, and uncradle it slowly so you can be sure it's not going to fall out because perhaps you tightened the dovetail but the male dovetail rail wasn't actually in the slot (I've done this once in a while!).
* Open the little red occ box (for Jordan), and mount the plastic red-dot finder on its rail on the orange telescope tube (we call the tube the OTA "Optical Tube Assembly"). Hopefully you turned OFF the red dot last time you used it, so the battery's not dead. Those little 2032 button batteries are expensive to buy.
* Screw on the 2" diagonal onto the back of the 8SE scope and insert the 70mm 2" "Q70" Orion eyepiece into the diagonal. This is the correct eyepiece to match my Q70 charts.
* Connect the scope to 12V DC power and turn it on. The controller will have you wait for a few seconds before you can then hit "enter"
* Use the down arrow on the lower right side of the key pad to push twice so it says "Two Star Align" and then press "enter"
* It'll now ask you for the time. You use Pacific time like your watch is set to. For times past 12 noon, use Military time (13, 14, etc hr up to 24 hr). It'll ask whether it's "standard" or "daylight' and press "enter" when it's correct.
* Now it'll ask for your first Align star. You need to have learned a few bright stars and can find them! I'll suggest for the Sosva occultation Feb 7 that you choose your first star as Aldebaren or Betelguese or maybe Sirius.
* Now use the upper arrow buttons to move the scope to that star, using the LED red dot to get you close. You will want to carefully make sure there's no slack in the gears by doing the following procedure: Put your star in the lower left quadrant of the eyepiece field, and then with little motions on the buttons, navigate the star to the center but do NOT go past center. If you go past center, then go backwards enough to start again. The goal is to get the star centered by keeping in the lower left corner at all times while centering. Don't let it go into any of the other 3 quadrants. When centered, hit "Enter" and then "Align" one button after the other; the "Align" button is to the upper left side of the keypage.
* Now it'll automatically go to the next alphabetical star on the list and ask you for your 2nd align star. Don't go to the shown star, choose one that is far away from your first star and close to your target. For the Sosva event of Feb 7, I'd suggest using Regulus in Leo the Lion. After you center it and hit "Enter" and "Align", you will hear the tracking motors turn on and the scope should be tracking. By using staras far apart and using one of them near your target, you best guarantee that your GoTo will arrive where it should and you can recognize the star patterns.
* Now on the keypad, hit the "Menu" button and then use the arrow keys to go down till it says "GoTo RA Dec" and push "Enter". Now enter the RA and hit "Enter". It'll then let you enter the Dec. The first thing on the Dec entry is whether it is + or -. To change it, you push an arrow key (either one will do) then hit "Enter", and now you can enter the rest of the numbers for the Declination, then hit "Enter" and the scope will slew to the target.
* In my experience, the GoTo will often be imperfect. The target may be slightly off the eyepiece field, so do try and move it around until you recognize the star pattern. The circle on my chart is the same size as what you see. in the eyepiece and the same orientation exactly if you're 20 minutes before the event. If not, it may be slightly angled. If you're getting too close to the event time.
* If you can't ID the star field, then try to GoTo a bright star in the same general area, and see if it does a good GoTo (If it's bad, you may need to do aa new 2-star align from scratch). For the Sosva event, use the "stars" button and GoTo Regulus. If it goes to Regulus pretty well, then your align should be good. When it gets too close to event time, I won't waste more time on trying to ID the field in the eyepiece, and instead I will swap in the Watec and use the LCD chart to get me on-target... Kirk Bender doesn't even try to ID the field in the eyepiece and goes straight to the chip chart. (By the way notice that the eyepiece chart looks reversed from the chip chart. That's deliberate. Whenever you have your image bounce off a mirror before you record it, it will swap left and right. When you have the Watec in the usual straight-through configuration, you just have the two mirrors inside the telescope and but when you use a diagonal, there's now 3 mirrors and so there's one more reversal.)
* It's now time to open the OccBox. Unwrap the coiled lines to the Watec and pull it out. Pull out the Startech cable with the USB-A at the end, and plug the USB into the USB port on the Lenovo laptop
* Now reach with your finger down into the gap in the OccBox top shelf to the little toggle and flip the switch to power it up. See the lights under the shelf to confirm power up.
* Now fire up the Lenovo computer. Use external AC power to the wall wort power cable to the laptop if you can. The battery power may not last, if the battery has been unused for a long time. Start up the software IOTA VC2.4 by clicking the icon for it on the Win10 desktop.
* When it's up, click on the "options" menu and click on "video properties" and move it off the default (640x480)to the 720x520 choice which is best for the PAL Watec. You should see the black screen get a little bigger. You should be seeing the UT time along the bottom of the screen. If not, check the video connections and also make sure the switch on the front of the IOTA VTI didn't accidentally get rubbed to the "position" when it should be on "time" setting. (the front of the VTI rubs against the bottom side of the OccBox and may push that switch up if you're fooling around under the shelf. Normally you should not have to lift the shelf for anything.
* Do one last check at the eyepiece now that you've spent a few minutes away from the eyepiece. If the field has drifted, move it back.
* Remove the 2" diagonal and eyepiece. Screw on the f/6.3 focal reducer, and then screw on the black Celestron-to-1.25" adapter that is what usually lives on the back end of the 8SE telescope. Now remove the cap from the Watec and screw on the metal extender tube that you normally leave on the black upper shelf of the OccBox.
* Insert the Watec into the 1.25" adapter at the back of the scope and twist it until the brass video cable output is in the 12 o'clock position (up). The little white push wheel should now be on the left side of the back of the Watec. It's important do orient this correctly or the stars will not align with my charts. The size of the square for the 8SE with f/6.3 reducer is a little bigger than the inner box and not as big as the outer box on my chart. My chart may seem way too big, but that's because it may not initially be on target and you'll need your pattern making skills to ID the star field and it could be farther away than you'd prefer to hope.
* You probably won't see any stars on the screen. Bright ones may show as big donuts. Grab the 8SE focus knob and make about 7 clockwise turns from when it was focused with the eyepiece, and that should be close enough to be proper focus for the Watec. I'd change the integration setting to 8x or even 16x so you can see lots of stars because now you have to ID the star field and your target, and that will require seeing lots of stars.How to do that?...
* Setting the Watec Camera: For most events, you'll only want to alter one setting - the in-camera integration. You will be changing that very likely on every event. Even just to identify stars, you may first need to get a long integration to see enough stars you can ID the proper star field.
--- changing the integration setting: on the Watec camera itself, push inward the little white wheel on the back, left side It should default to showing a menu and the top entry is "shutter". Push the wheen again and that should make the little triangle next to "shutter" star blinking; that means it's now able to be adjusted. Now instead of pushing on the wheel, you rotate the wheel to make changes. You should see it cycle through everything from 1/100,000th of a second up to EI (auto exposure. Don't ever use that), to 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x, 32x, 64x, 128x and 256x. The "x" means how many fields are integrated into a single integration from the camera. 2x is 2 fields per integration. 2x fields = 1 frame. The chip has even numbered rows and odd-numbered rows, so one field is the even rows output, the next field is the odd number rows. Even + odd = entire chip = 1 "frame". 2 fields = 1 frame. It's a little confusing but that's the deal. The bigger the number, the longer the integration and the brighter will be what you see on the Lenovo screen. To see enough stars to be able to ID your field, you'll probably want to go to at least 4x or 8x, maybe even 16x. Depends on conditions.
--- Other settings. Under "Adj" you will see "Gain". You will normally want that at maximum gain, which is Gain=41. Sharpness is best kept low. Kirk and I leave it on the default setting which is Sharpness=4. Gamma is the other setting, which should be left at Gamma=1.0 in most cases. Lowering Gamma will make dimmer things brighter but ruin the linearity of the response. For measing things like magnitude changes, that's not good. Beside, since you have the IOTA VC2.4 software, there's options on that software (see later) which can help with getting best signal. I just leave Gamma=1 since I got the Lenovo.
Under one of the menus is "BPC" which means "bad pixel correction". Probably every few months you'll want to do a BPC and you'll know because you'll start seeing hot pixels on your screen. To do a BPC, you push on it, and it'll tell you to cover the telescope, then push it again and it'll take a minute or so before it says it's done, and your bad pixels should be "gone" (probably a clever median combine of neighboring pixels. It can only do up to 64 bad pixels Any more than that and the correction won't be great. Probably leave that alone for the start of your adventures.
* After you've got focused stars and ID'd your field and tracking is working, now you want to set the integration to as short as you can and still consistently see the target star. It doesn't have to be bright, it just has to be consistently visible.
* Fine tuning the recording settings. On the Lenovo's IOTA VC2.4 software you'll see a box on the left that includes recording "brightness" and "contrast". The other sliders below that you can safely ignore, always. But "brightness" sets the brightness range of the recording, and "contrast" adjusts the range of values the pixels will occupy. You will want to carefully adjust both of these until the star is best visible against a dark background. Don't just push up the brightness. I found that ends up with saturated pixels and bright hot sky (which will show as red pixels). You want a smooth dark but not pure black sky background, and the star to show as well as possible against that background. For me it always takes some fiddling before I'm happy. I do this adjustment now on every event, carefully to maximize Signal/Noise. If you go too dark, the target occupies just the lowest bit values and noise is too high. If you go too high, you get saturated pixels and too much sky subtraction noise. So, it's a bit of a game you have to play and I had to (and still have to) learn along the way what's best. It's a bit of an art you will learn with time.
* Setting the integration - considerations: Many of our events are very short; less than 1 second long. In order to be judged "significant" by the reviewers, you need to insure there are several points inside the occultation. At least 3 and hopefully at least 4, is a good goal. More is better, but too many and each point will be so low and noisy you still may fail. So again, it's a trade-off. If the depth of the occultation is shallow (faint star, bright asteroid), then you have to make sure not just that your star is consistently visible, but that it is bright enough to detect a shallow event. A good rule of thumb is to just look at the magnitude of the star alone and figure how long you'd have to integrat to get a complete disappearance of that star, apart from the asteroid brightness. If the asteroid is really bright you risk saturated pixels to go that long, to get a faint 13th or 14th mag star. In that case you adjust the recording brightness to make sure you don't have saturated pixels. Saturated pixels will ruin seeing a shallow occultation.
* Recording: Push the software red button to start the recording. I usually go for at least 1 minute before to 1 minute after the event no matter how short the predicted duration is, so I can get a good sample of points to help get an accurate statistical sample of integrations. Espcially if my integration setting is real long, I may have to go longer. YOu should also always go at least 10 diameters and more like 15 or 20 diameters before, and again after the predicted time for start and stop. That should cover enough time to nab any moonlets that might be around.
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After your recording, then we'll want you to learn to do your reductions in PyMovie and PyOTE. That's a whole new kettle of fish, too big for right here. And that can wait till later.
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