Finder for the Q70 eyepiece
This is the same square size as for the f/3.3 reducer and is probably wrong for the High Pt 0.5x reducer. Will fine-tune that later. Note this is right-left reversed since I'll be using the 1.25" diagonal with Watec
My third occultation in as many nights. I hope for this one, the sky and rock cooperate... Rank is decent, altitude is a problem: 75 degrees, requiring me to use the 1.25" diagonal to fit the Watec under the scope and clear the base. I've not done an event like that before, so it'll be something new, only tested it once.
Preston Page and map
Finder for the Q70 eyepiece |
This is the same square size as for the f/3.3 reducer and is probably wrong for the High Pt 0.5x reducer. Will fine-tune that later. Note this is right-left reversed since I'll be using the 1.25" diagonal with Watec |
Success! I drove to Lexington Reservoir dam, the parking lot on the east side of the spillway. Got about a 2 second disappearance. This was the first success using the Highpoint 0.5x reducer and diagonal to avoid running the Watec into the base at high altitude. The 9.0th magnitude star nearby was an obvious donut w/o any re-focusing after swapping, and only a turn or so got it in focus. I had some uncertainty in how the charts were oriented and ended up leaving the integration on 32x, which in hindsight I should have changed to 16x or even 8x. I felt I had the star in the frame, but wasn't 100% sure which of 2 or 3 it actually was, till it disappeared on schedule.
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Telescope spot on the Lexington dam. 121d 59' 26.4395" W +37d 12' 04.81"N elevation of scope 198m |
Begin tape 8:53:11UT, end recording 8:55:33, camera mode 32x fields = 16x frames integration, offset=0. So my event was 3 sec late, and the event accuracy in time was +-3 sec. I had a 2.93 sec event.
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I was concerned about the tracking, since the disappearance would be almost complete, and so I chose linked tracking using the slighly dimmer star nearby. I used the same star as comparison, and set the aperture circles the same as for the target; 8/9/21. I used a little larger circles than usual because with 1/2 second integration, the star jumped a bit more than usual and on first pass (albeit using PSF tracking) the target reached the edge of the aperture circle at 5 pixels. It may have been due to the setting of PSF tracking, which I took off for the curves above.
Here is the LiMovie .csv photometry. And below is the analysis of that file by OCCULAR...
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Here is the .csv of the Final Report
The raw video (not uploaded to the Cabrillo server - it's too big. But this just gives the location)
Here is the IOTA report sent to Brad Timerson on 12/25/17 but revised to fix a position error on 12/25/21.
