This event originally was predicted to pass over Pinnacles, but now goes over Bonny Doon, with the southern limit near Watsonville and so we get good odds of a "hit" from home, for myself, Kirk, and Karl. It's nicely high in the sky at 37 degrees, in the East-Northeast which is perfect for me at home. A storm front is coming in and may have started to cloud skies by event time, but the trend is for forecasts to show the front arriving later and later so we may be in business!
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Results:
The good news is - everyone got data! Karl's first confident recording of the target during the event! The bad news is - we all had a miss. Bummer. As it turns out, I needed to look harder at any and all notes to this event which might be relevant. I posted a warning on the Google.io message board for IOTA, for other observers to not trust predictions for the Celsius event. IOTA President Steve Preston did some investigating and found that the proper motion for the star was indeterminate.... David Herald posted "In the comments section on the main page for the Celsius event you will see the following notation: “NO proper motion in DR3”. In other words, the current Gaia data release was not able to determine a full solution for this star. In this situation you should not trust the formal uncertainties."
I filed my IOTA report and will report Karl's as well, tonight. Kirk's examined his tape. Definite miss. I set up at a driveway to a burned out house, about midway between Kirk's track through the Bonny Doon Ecological Reserve, and Karl's just 200 yds from his house, at "water tank turn". Kirk's filed his 'miss' report too.
Now, I just found a web link that says that not all the stars in the 8SE database can be used for alignment, only the stars brighter than 2.5 magnitude. There are 82. Perhaps those are the ONLY ones to show up on the 2-star align choice, but in fact it seems like that list might be longer, or at least it SEEMS very long when doing the operations. I'm going to have to make an effort to learn more of these stars so I can get better alignments, especially from my horizon limited driveway. The list of 8SE alignment stars useful at my latitude is in the grad ay8 folder.