This follows a near identical path to the previous night's El Leoncito event, tempting us to re-use stations. The combined magnitude is 12.95 so will look brighter than the target star on the charts. The drop is to 13.5. for up to 8.8 seconds. The altitude is only 21 degrees, so that will also make it rather difficult. The star is in Ophiuchus near the southern border.
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The fog situation was very much like the previous night, however the path for this one was narrower, less certain and a bit further north. We could have literally re-used our prior night's stations, but I thought it more valuable if we could get a bit further north on average, and when we arrived in Hollister we reached the edge of the fog, and it was clear as we drove south for miles. Several miles south of Paicines, the skies were clear, the fog had remained in Hollister, we had a good site for Kirk, and we watched for a bit and it looked like the fog wasn't advancing. And, the air felt reasonably dry. Odds looked good, and we set him up, then I drove south, and used his site near the CalFire station just after you top out on Hwy 25 into the rolling valley towards Pinnacles. It was being too optimistic, alas... fog came to Kirk's station 25 minutes before the event, and it was opaque at event time. For me, the sky remained perfect and the star did look by-eye to fade about 0.5 magnitude for roughly 10 seconds. I haven't reduced the data yet. I took a few shots of me and the set up, and the Milky Way, got the event, and packed up more quickly this time to maximize sleep time. Rushed back to Kirk, heard the sad story, and continued home. During our ride, we discussed PyMovie and PyOTE and the ways the documentation could be improved to guide decision-making by observers.
Tracking, target, and sky background light curves from PyMovie |
PyMovie screen capture |
PyMOvie zoom in on target event |
Raw PyMovie target photometry |
PyOTE derived event determination. The timings are shown below the light curve, with error bars |
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Solid, zero possibility of being a false positive |
PyMovie photometry .csv file and PyOTE csv file are on the orange memory stick.
