This is a low-ish ranked event, not high enough to justify a trip to Walnut Creek or Los Banos to get near the centerline. The odds from Santa Cruz are very low. About 2%. But, Kirk and I plan to be up at upper meadow UCSC to test the visibility of high value Weywot event which is on Wednesday night from southern Carrizo Plain. And to get comparable conditions, we need to get our video test around 11pm or later, so this midnight event is just an excuse to get some real data even if low odds.
The star altitude is 23 degrees. Very close to the "foot" of the eastern leg of Ophiuchus, above the tail of Scorpius.
|
|
I recorded at 16x, the target was pretty dim, used a 4.5px aperture fixed circle. In the PyMovie plots below, it turns out I didn't place the sky aperture over a blank sky spot, but there was a dim star that didn't show up on the frame that I used to place apertures. Hence, the "sky" aperture is biased above the 0 level artificially and should be ignored. The target aperture was placed correctly and stayed pretty well aligned on the target star. There was significant seeing flickering, and at 16x, a short event could have been missed. The preducted maximum duration of 1.2s means at most 5 integrations would be at zero, full drop. The odds of a hit were only 2% and the light curve is most consistent with a miss, which is what is being reported.
The sky aperture inadvertantly could be seen to contain a faint star on most integrations, and should be ignored as a sky level. |
PyMovie screen capture, the target is shown in its aperture at bottom |
Target light curve, with time of event labelled. Looks like a miss. |
Tracking star #1. I used a snap-to blob aperture for these two tracking stars. The bump occured well after the predicted event time. |
Tracking star#2. |
Report sent 6/21/23 to IOTA
Kirk inadvertantly had the 3DNR set to "ON", where it was during an earlier test for a prior event testing. This might have affected the strange light curves in his data, but we're not sure if that's the cause of the long-wave wiggles in all light curves or not. We both used PyMovie ver 3.7.68z. In any case, we recorded from the exact same location, only a few meters apart. This data is consistent with a miss, too.
PyMovie composite light curves. All show strong waviness that is uncorrelated between curves. |
Target light curve |
PyOTE light curve of target (bottom) and reference star (top) used as reference, smoothed. A miss, but not good S/N, which is an unusual outcome for Kirk's data. |
