This is a decent but not perfect rank event which passes north of Santa Cruz a bit. Odds of a hit are 60% from Locatelli Ranch at the top of Empire Grade. This looks like a good excuse to get to a dark site and test the observability of the Phaethon event on Oct 30 too, so I plan to try this. I hope Kirk will join me and we can get two stations. The altitude is difficult, at 13 degrees in Sagittarius in the Southwest. Locatelli Ranch I believe will have a good enough horizon at the usual spot at the gate. The predicted duration is 2.4s so it can handle some integration. It's a dense star field but I don't see any other stars that will be in the aperture and foil good photometry. Given clear dry stable moonless skies up there, which is predicted, then it should be doable. Still, processing with 'appsum' in PyOTE (ie not doing a frame-to-frame sky subtraction) may improve stable photometry given the prospect of other stars interferring with 'sky'.
Alt=16, Az=206.
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The star turned out to be easier to see than I expected. The 2200 ft altitude and clean skies with no moon, and dry - all of that helped quite a bit. I got a solid 2.1 second occultation.
R. Nolthenius (PyOTE log file)
I observed from the south-side turnout at Locatelli meadow; it had a perfect view of Sagittarius between the oaks. The skies were cloudless, dry, no wind. Perfect conditions. I decided 16x would be needed for a 13.6 star at 16 degrees altitude and therefore predicted to look like a 14.6 star at the zenith. I probably could have gotten it fine at 8x, but not sure the timing accuracy would be any better.
Target star in red. |
PyMovie photometry of the target. Used static 4.5 pixel default aperture. I was a little worried about the very bright star that was inside the finder box, but it was successfully excluded by the software |
Event was short, but beat the false positive test |
The PyOTE light curve, after integration of points. |
PyOTE solution |
Kirk Bender
Kirk observed from Sunlit Lane, next to the BD airport, under good conditions as well.
Additional task - test the capability of my system to detect sufficiently the Phaethon event of Oct 30, which lasts only 0.22 seconds and is only 12.88 magnitude, albeit at high altitude of 62 degrees and in a dark moonless sky. It's a long drive and I want to be sure I can get useful data. Below is the orientation of the Phaeton target (midway between Perseus and Andromeda) at 9pm, after the Lykaon event is done.
Target at: 02h 03m 47.82s, +42 44 52" on date of observing, not J2000.
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