This event passes through the Mono Lake area, where we should be camping before heading home from the solar eclipse on Sunday. The event is at 22 deg altitude, is pretty bright at 11.4, but the RUWE is 1.45 so the tight limits should be given more leeway. It's in Taurus in the east, and a full drop for up to 2.3s. I set a site on Owens River Road at a clearing with a view to the east, for camping, if it's clear. If it's cloudy, we may want to camp farther north near some stream, like Virginia Lakes.
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A 30s exposure at our camp, where Kirk got the event, and is here setting up telescopes |
At my site south of Obsidian Dome. Monitoring the data stream |
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The dark lanes of the Galactic dust disk split the Summer Milky Way through Cygnus, setting in the northwest. |
Success! Kirk got a ~1.3 s positive from our camp just off Owens River Rd. I set up just south of Obsidian Dome and also got a 1.4s positive, in very cold 30F temperatures. I baked my camcorder in the heater air vent in the van. The camcorder was still warm-ish at the time of the recording and recorded OK. Kirk could not warm his camcorder, but still got a successful taping. The temperatures were near freezing, and by morning everything was covered with frost.
It was quite cold at my station, which was on the ORV area access road, one exit south of the Obsidian Dome exit. My hands got painfully cold trying to set up the roll-up table. Temperatures were in the 30's. No wind, clear skies. Very dark. I used the dew shield, no dew on corrector plate.
Long. 119 00 00.17"
Lat. 37 45 48.43
Elev.
8559 ft
I used PyMOvie with a Fourier finder integration, and then used the TME method for aperture determination on 2 reference stars and the target. In PYote it is clear there is a slow modulation of the stars, which was largely removed by using reference star 1 (closest to the target) as a reference, with 50 integration smoothing. PyOTE Timings:
magDrop report: percentDrop: 91.2 magDrop: 2.634 +/- 0.261 (0.95 ci)
DNR: 3.03
D time: [06:42:57.9818]
D: 0.6800 containment intervals: {+/- 0.0070} seconds
D: 0.9500 containment intervals: {+/- 0.0190} seconds
D: 0.9973 containment intervals: {+/- 0.0389} seconds
R time: [06:42:59.3749]
R: 0.6800 containment intervals: {+/- 0.0070} seconds
R: 0.9500 containment intervals: {+/- 0.0190} seconds
R: 0.9973 containment intervals: {+/- 0.0389} seconds
Duration (R - D): 1.3931 seconds
Duration: 0.6800 containment intervals: {+/- 0.0102} seconds
Duration: 0.9500 containment intervals: {+/- 0.0236} seconds
Duration: 0.9973 containment intervals: {+/- 0.0440} seconds
Screen capture of PyMovie, with target star below. |
Composite of the 2 reference stars, target (red), and (green) sky |
PyMovie light curve of target |
Zoomed in. |
PyOTE analysis below. PyOTE 5.4.0 version
False positive test passed easily. |
I set up on this dirt road access to an off-road vehicle area, 47 feet in from the nearest point on the road from the telephone pole visible in this image. |
Target and ref1 were virtually the same brightness. Ref1 was smoothed by 50 points to remove the slow variability. |
Zoomed in on the 1.4s occultation. |
Asteroid (17270) Nolthenius
My namesake asteroid was well placed in the south, in Aquarius, after the occultation. Skies were SO dark, I thought this might be the best chance I'd have for some time, to photograph this faint asteroid on the Watec 910hx. I set integration to maximum, at 256x, which is 4 seconds. I took 222 frames of Fourier Finder integration within PyMovie, that's 74 seconds of combined frames, then stretched the contrast to bring out the faint stars. 16th magnitude stars were captured brightly with ease, and 18th magnitude just barely, as I calculated. There's a faint smudge where Nolthenius was predicted to be, and I believe that's it.
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