This event misses Santa Cruz; we need to get up to Pomponio Beach area to have a good chance at it.
|
|
Kirk carpooled with me, driving up to San Gregorio, above the southern limit. We stopped at the top of Stage Rd, avoiding a camper RV parked in the spot I'd hoped would be free. But, these days, there's always people parked in such places along the rural by-ways. They didn't provide any bother. We set Kirk across the road, about 50 yds away, with a clear view to the east and the target in Leo Minor. We had some cirrus, but not a lot. With a little luck we'd be OK. I then continued up towards Half Moon bay, closer to the centerline. IOTA report sent in on 2/23/23
I set up at the same location I'd used a year or so ago, with Kirk on a double asteroid event - on a rural road south of Half Moon Bay. After being there for about 10 minutes and mid-setup, a pick up drove towards me along this road, stopped, kept its lights on, and I suppose wondered what I was doing there. Finally 5 guys got out and just looked at me... hmmm, was this going to be a "situation"?? So I went into my astro asteroids talk, making sure I was a wonky and articulate as possible, and my college astronomer status. I was clear that this asteroid shadow was narrow and there was limited choices in how to position observing stations. I pointed out I set up between the fences and would be gone in 40 minutes. They said they'd be back in 30 to make sure I'm packing up and leaving. Sheesh! This road had some what looked like ranch hand abodes, for the property in back of the locked gate I was near. Anyway, all went well after that, although the target star was in some thin cirrus for the event, it wasn't fatal. I used a brighter but still unsaturated nearby star as a reference in PyOTE. I also used the diffraction option.
 |
 |
 |
False positive test: passed easily. |
Since there was some cirrus, I used 'ref' option in PyOTE, It seemed to help quiet the noise of the target light curve. |
 |
I input the relevant numbers into the 'Diffraction' tab to see how that would affect the timings. It hardly changed, not significantly. I was surprised, however, to see that the 'camera response' |
Kirk was set up at the top of Stage Rd where it intersects Hwy 1. He had a little more trouble with cirrus clouds than I did. However, not enough to kill his observations. His are a little noisier, but I believe he has a clear miss or if there was an event, it was less than 1 integration (.27 seconds for 16x setting, which is what we used). He tried many settings but none gave an event. He was closer to the southern limit and a miss isn't impossible, but for my 2.0s event, for him to have a miss suggests the shape of the asteroid was non-circular.
The clouds caused a small dip in brightness for the reference star, before the predicted occultation. |
 |
