This event barely hits Santa Cruz. Moss Landing is on centerline. Bright star, 70 deg altitude so be careful and move scope ALL the way forward in fork. Good rank. Karl and I are planning on getting it from near the centerline in Moss Landing. Kirk will anchor the northern limit area near home.
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When OW opens C2A on command, and puts you on the target star, it does not also click and give you the information on that target star from C2A. That's a separate step, which in my rush, I forgot to do. Instead, the RA and Dec coords I saw were from my previous asteroid event 2 days earlier! The chart is right, but how to get there is wrong. Fatal! |
Karl came down to Cabrillo and joined the last hour of Astro 8A . We did the class indoors, due to the screamingly high winds and freezing temperatures, and the danger of tree fall trapping us on the Observatory road, as happened last semester. We worked on the Mercury orbit lab indoors. Then, we took off and caravaned to Moss Landing. I set Karl at the public launch parking lot just past the kayak place, protected from the north wind by a wall. I helped get him set up, and then drove to the fruit stand just south of town, where I set up behind the plywood cutout farm scene as a wind break. Kirk first tried setting up at Wilder Ranch's farm fields, but rain came and he headed back. Then it cleared, and he set up near Antonelli Pond, and got a successful 0.6s event.
I settled on setting up behind the funky old plywood cutout ad board for the fruit stand. It blocked the wind decently well, and also a blazingly bright light too. I got entirely set up before noticing that the RA/Dec looked suspiciously too different from what I think they should have been if near the Beehive star cluster. Sure enough, my "go-to" sent it to Leo Minor, and I realized that in my rush to get up to UCSC earlier in the day for the Nate Hagens meetings, that I spaced out on right-click on the target to get the proper RA, Dec. Instead, the C2A program still showed the RA, Dec coordinates of the Hertzsprung event of 2 nights earlier. Damn! I tried calling Karl to tell him, then calling Kirk, but it was now only 3 minutes till the event and he was too busy to help. I didn't want him to compromise his own data, so hung up so he'd not worry about us. Once it was only 1 minute till the event, I called back hoping that he'd be all set and taping now, and could give me the coords. He did, but by the time I got them entered and swung there, it was now 30 seconds after the event. I blew it! My first fumble of the year. Unfortunately, I'd fumbled it for Karl too, who'd taken the night to join me and get his equipment for sure working and checked out. That part got accomplished, and he seemed to take this muff in stride. I'm going to suggest that in OW desktop that it perform that step automatically.
My astro 8A class was glad to get out a tad early, to enable our attempt at this asteroid occultation. |
Karl, setting up behind a wall at the public lauch's parking lot |
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Me, set up behind the old-fashioned farm sign at the fruit stand south of town. |
Kirk Bender - PyOTE log file
Kirk tried setting up at Wilder Ranch, but rain had him pack up and give up... till it cleared on the drive back home, and he re-set up near Antonelli Pond and had a good success. "I kept the tripod low and used my car for a wind shield, it softened the wind but I still had strong shake on the recording, Luckily it was stable for a while around the event to get a good analysis, but if I tried to analyze for a longer interval on either side, pymovie would lose tracking."
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