The Occultation of a 12.1 (combined) by (138) Tolosa

Jan 6, 2022 Thur evening at 10:02pm

Preston Predictions

 

This event crosses Santa Cruz with good rank and high odds of a "hit" in Santa Cruz and in the Santa Cruz Mtns. It's at a convenient time of 10:02pm, in Gemini, at good altitude.

   

 

Results

A nice success battling fog and clouds which swallowed most of the Santa Cruz area and mountains, but Kirk and I both got lucky and had the radiation fog stay away from our sites. I set up on Braemoor Rd at the top of Bonny Doon, to maximum avoid inversion fog if that's what formed. Kirk set up at the Ecological Reserve.

Nolthenius - PyOTE log file

I had one irked neighbor who needed calming down as I set up in a vacant lot across from his place, but otherwise things went smoothly. I did have heavy humidity and cold, and condensation formed on my corrector plate by the end, even with the dew shield. It did not seem to affect the data. I did need to do a lot of experimenting in PyMovie to find the right parameters, as this was a dim star that only faded by 0.4 magnitude for a few seconds. What worked best, and significantly so, was to use a spinner aperture setting of 4 for the target. It defaults instead typically to a larger number which confines the aperture to fewer pixels. In my final run, I did not use the entire light curve too, because fog began to affect my site, and my corrector plate in the last 40 sec or so of the full video. Instead I kept the clean data around the minute centered on the event. The red bar /black bar test worked out then, and the event, which occured at the predicted time, satisfied the 0 probability of being a false positive.

 

 

Kirk Bender - PyoteLog file

Kirk observed from the Bonny Doon Ecological Reserve under good conditions. He used 4x setting on the Watec