The Occultation of a 12.3 star by Regina

Mar 22, 2021 at 10:34:37pm PDT

Preston Predictions

 

New Gaia data has refined this orbit and the path has high rank. Santa Cruz is just inside the northern limit. Karl, on Highland, is an almost certain miss. The altitude is only 21 degrees in the NW, in southern Perseus above the Plieades, very close to the Iris Nebula. The star does a full drop for only 1.54 sec

   

Results:

Good success. I got a 0.80 sec event from Mill St near DeLaveaga's parking lot off Branciforte, and Kirk got it from home. We both had our ZR45mc camcorders record properly - nice!

Nolthenius Results

This was the only place I could find on GoogleEarth where I had a good view of the NW at 21 degrees altitude and inside the path decently. It was on the driveway to the ranch on Mill Rd across from DeLaveaga Park

LiMovie, using aperture photometry and tracked using the bright nearby star as guide, and the fainter star at far right as comparison star in purple.

Zoomed in. I used 16x, so 8 frames per integration and at 8/30=.2667 s per integration. So 3 frames for the integration is 0.80 s. That is what PyOTE found. However, to my mind, the levels were above 0 in this light curve's "wing" frames, telling me the D happened just a moment before that point, and the R just a moment before the first undimmed point.

PowerShot grab off the LCD screen, showing the target at 16x integration.

PyOTE Reductions

My full light curve, with integrations grouped into single points.

Zoomed in on the D and R after PyOTE solution

Distribution of trail D times

The probability distribution of the dips. The actual occultation dip is much deeper, and the red line to the right of the blue line is good evidence it's real. Formally, if the red line is to the right of the black vertical line, the occultation has 0% chance of being a false positive.

LiMovie CSV photometry file

RN-LM.PYOTE.csv

PyOTE Log file