The Occultation of a W=12.7 Star by 1999VQ48

June 19, 2024 at 12:44am

 

This is a moderate rank event, with Kirk and I inside the predicted shadow path, and Karl far outside. It's a very red and very faint star in Sagittarius, near NGC 6631 open cluster, faint. But might be a good GoTo to verify it's GoTo'ing properly. It's just off the lower left edge of the LCD chip.

Alt=39, Az=160 and should be visible from home. It's in Scutum, right of the tail feathers and slightly lower.

V=13.4, R=12.1

     

 

Results:

I got a recording from Rincon St. Kirk had power connection trouble and late getting on-target. No data.

Richard Nolthenius

I set up on Rincon next to the apartment complex. I got a recording, at 8x. At the predicted time, there's clearly no event. The star was bright and easily followed. But 30s earlier, I had a single point drop to zero. The 'sky' histogram was fully visible, at this 8x setting and moon in the sky. And centered on zero as proper, so a drop to zero is consistent with an occultation. But, 30s early?? Was it a bad pixel patch ? No one at IOTA will believe an occultation if the bad pixel patch alternative hasn't bee ruled out. So, this will need more work before submission.

 

   

 

Kirk Bender

I got a no-observation. I two-star aligned ok on polaris and antares, did a goto-ra-dec, and had a hard time id'ing the eyepiece field because of the moon skyglow, I could only see one star at first. I eventually i'd the field with a few stars on the edge, swapped in the camera and I recognized the field right away. But it started to drift, and found I lost power to the scope. I did not have time to re-align, so I tried to find the field again to try a drift-through recording. But I could not find the field again. The failure appears to be at the cigarette lighter plug in the occ box, rather than the connector at the scope. I did check the seating of all the plugs as I always do while setting up, but apparently it wasn't enough. After the event, I wiggled the plug and it went out, then I bent the side contacts of the plug to make a tighter fit, but it still seems to lose power sometimes, maybe the center pin isn't long enough. Those cig lighter connections in general are unreliable, I'll see what I can do, but should probably just forget the plug and hard wire it, with an inline fuse.