This is a high rank event but a tough faint star, and clouds will be an issue. But it's Sunday right after dark, with the sun at -13 and is high confidence from Pinnacles or a bit north. So the temptation is to spend the day at Pinnacles doing trail running, then have some packed dinner, and then get the event on the way home.
|
|
|
Kirk was busy, and I tried this one solo, indeed after a sublime afternoon hike of the Pinnacles High Peaks trail, where I saw many condors.
Richard Nolthenius
The cirrus clouds followed the GFS model pretty well, although a bit further north than hoped or expected. The expected clear band at the time of sunset was began a little farther north than desired, getting uncomfortably close to the northern limit. I drove north from Pinnacles, stopping at a few usable sites, and watched and waffled, and finally decided to be at the south end of Cienega Valley about a mile before it climbed the canyon to the twisty part heading to Pinnacles. It was a good choice, although lots of headlights until it got dark and then traffic got lighter. I got a 5.3s solid occultation of this faint star, so that was gratifying.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
The scatter in the comparison star made me think it was likely adding noise rather than improving the solution, so after generating the plots above, I did it again on the same photometry in PyOTE, but this time without normalizing to the smoothed comparison star. I got a better set of accuracies and a slightly cleaner light curve below. The event lasted 5.3s, reasonable compared to the 7s central predicted duration, and the dip was about the correct depth.
 |
 |
PyOTE log file