This event goes centrally across the city of Santa Cruz with good rank. It's a "sure thing". Altitude is 71 degrees, so will challenge not hitting the camera on the base. Suggest shortening one tripod leg to tilt the scope vertical away from the zenith. The star is in Cancer.
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Great success! For the first time, Karl, Kirk and I all had successful tapings of a positive occultation. My event was 3.74 seconds and Kirk's, from the Upper Meadow of UCSC was 3.94 sec, and on schedulel. Karl's data is still on the miniDV tape. He plans to get a cheap PC laptop to enable his reductions for future events.
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Kirk Bender observed from the upper meadow of UCSC to gain some cross-track distance from my station. His event lasted 3.51 seconds. It looks like I was on the centerline, just as predicted, and shorter events for Karl and Kirk on either side of me.
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Karl got a successfully recorded positive! His Watec is my old one, original model and less sensitive, and he has a smaller FOV with only an f/6.3 reducer, and a tough learning curve to climb - so getting good data while being inside the shadow of an event, is a great milestone. I received his miniDV tape and did the reductions on my computer. Karl plans to get a laptop PC which we'll load up with OccultWatcher, PyMovie and PyOTE for later.
Karl integrated at 16x, yet his timing accuracy was only a bit worse than mine, even though I integrated at 4x setting. His event lasted 2.89 seconds.
The PyMovie screen. I was initially fooled by the few very hot pixels on Karl's camera, using them as tracking stars and failing! |
There were diagonal electronic interference lines on the video which may have contributed to the noise. The night was clear. |
Fortunately, the occultation was deep and happened at a good stable moment. |
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The PyOTE light curve; fewer points because of the longer integration setting, and a little shorter recording period as well. |
