The Occultation of a 13.6 Star by Asteroid Tomoegozan

Sept 21, 2023 at 10:07:42 pm

 

This is a special event; recently discovered to be either of odd shape, or a contact binary, as it gave a double occultation on a recent event.

The path goes through Montara and Hillsborough. It's an hour drive from Santa Cruz,a little faster for Hillsborough by I-280. It's 13.6 but R=12.6 so it ought to look about 13.0 magnitude, and only disappears for 1.7 seconds, at 20 deg altitude, so that's difficult. And, it's Astro 9A night. I'm tentatively planning on trying to do a very quick set of moon shots for people and then blast out for the occultation, IF it is fog-free.

How Observable is this? The V=12.58 and R=13.34 gives a W=12.96. The altitude is 20 degrees.

Let's compare to the similar Richilde event of last week. That had W=13.3 and altitude of 23 degrees. The extra 3 degrees of altitude corresponds to an extra 0.1 magnitude.

So, under identical skies, the Tomoegozan event is 0.34 mag -0.1 = 0.24 magnitude brighter than Richilde. But Tomoegozan has a 50% moon only 13 degrees away, and has a smokey atmosphere which I'm guessing easily adds a few tenths of extinction or more. This looks on the ragged edge of do-able.

 

     

 

Results:

Lots of planning and computer work and effort - but in the decision moment I pulled the plug. Fog was kissing the HMB coast and the local coast, and the smoke was thick enough to cause me to believe our odds of getting data was slim - and it conflicted with my Astro 9 class. I instead stayed with class as we photo'd the moon. Liu, Bender, Ted swift, also bailed out