This event is long: 55 seconds on the centerline! And the drop is large: 1.5 magnitudes, permitting good shape determination and good astrometry for Hilda. The rank is high, but Santa Cruz is once again on the limit; northern this time, so that getting a higher odds means driving south.. The altitude is 26 degrees at 222 azimuth.
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I drove Kirk south, to get deeper into the path, as it looked like the fog might not come in. I had planned to put Kirk near the Chevron station off Hwy 129/Hwy 1, but it was coned off and a mean dog too.... so after much scoping around, we put him on San Andreas/Beach Rd. I then drove back to Hwy 1 and then south to the 76 station and a promising old farm road opposite that, which terminated on the local hill - but fog was already creeping in over the target. I believe the deep marine canyon upwelling was helping generate the first inflow of fog for the Monterey Bay region. So I drove back north, ending up in a lettuce field off Jensen Rd at the crown of the road. Got good data, as did Kirk, and the occultation was visible by eye.
I set up on Jensen Rd south of Watsonville, about a 1/4 mile from Hwy 1, at the crown of the hill, next to a spot for parking big tractors etc. Skies were clear until about 20 minutes after the event, when fog began to form. There was a decent breeze, and the dew cap was causing the scope to jiggle too much so I pulled it off. That settled the scope pretty well, but it resulted in corrector plate condensation late in the recording. It didn't ruin the data, but a ref star will be needed to get best results.
Recovering the recording was difficult. The tape was stretched and damaged and initially would not play back. I advanced the tape far enough into the event to be able to get the recording w/o the dreated black bars on playback. I also note that when I connect up the camcorder to the Vaiao computer, it captures just what you see on the flip-out monitor. Even if the tape is good, if the playback on the heads is bad, that's what is send to the firewire. I'm not sure where I got this tape from; I think it may be a tape I was given by Karl, containing his old events. Or, it may have been a tape included in the box from Ted Blank. In any case, while it gave good recordings for a while, it seems (I HOPE) that it had reached the end of its recording days. The ZR45mc camcorder itself seems to be OK. It recordsn and plays back from from the new tape I've now put into it.
I had to create a couple of metal gizmos to facilitate examining and moving the tape manually to a good spot on the tape before the camcorder would 'synch' on it and then playback Hilda OK, downloading it into the Vaiao computer as usual. The following night's Pompaja event, though, was lost - no recording happened.
Here's my location, on Jensen Rd 0.2 miles from Hwy 1, in a small ag equipment parking spot off the pavement. Got a 28.72 sec event, 1.1 sec longer than Kirk's because I was a couple of miles deeper into the shadow below the northern limit. IOTA report sent in 1am Aug 9, 2023.
121 46 35.85
36 51 13.89
201 ft
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All light curves show the gradual appearance of condensation on the 8SE telescope's corrector plate, but even at the end, it wasn't particularly bad. |
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Using a reference star (ref1) flattened the target star light curve, although late in the recording period the noise naturally rose. |
Zoomed in. Very high time resolution. My event was 1.1 seconds longer than Kirk's, who was farther north and closer to the northern limit. |
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We set up Kirk at the intersection of San Andreas Rd and Beach Road, in a wide clearing on the south side. I scoped out where to put the scope to avoid power lines in that direction first.
No fog on Kirk's corrector plate. No wind there, it seems, and the dew shield was used OK. |
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