The Occultation of a 13.2 Star by Asteroid (620) Drakonia

Nov 16, 2024 at 2:41am

OWc page

This is a difficult event of good rank. Drakonia is a low numbered asteroid so it has a good orbit. The asteroid is G=14.3 (maybe R=14.1?), The target star is W=13.9. So the combined image is 13.3, and will fade to about 14.1. It will take integration to see this. Maybe 8x? But the full moon is only 13 degrees away. But it's high in the sky so aerosol trouble should be minimal. But humidity is high.

Path crosses Empire grade, Scotts Valley, misses Karl by too much to justify the observations.

Drop from W=13.2 to 14.1 for up to 1.1s, high overhead. Will need the 0.5x reducer unless you wait and acquire the target late. The altitude at event time is 71 degrees which is accessible with the f/0.33 reducer, but the altitude is 76 degrees 20 minutes before the event, and that is not accessible w/o using the 0.5x nosepiece reducer. I will assume to use the 0.5x reducer. In this case, the eyepiece and Watec charts are the same orientation - reversed left/right.

     

 

Results

I set up at my Pine Ridge site on Roger Road. Alas, it was windy up there, and I had to spend valuable time trying to re-park the car and deploy my roll out table to further block the wind, with limited success. The target overhead was also difficult to GoTo. But, I did find the target, but it was too close to the full moon and only barely visible above sky at 16x, and invisible at 8x, and washed out at 32x. The wind wrecked any chance of a good recording. I did take a few photos of the moon which had just completed its occultation of the Plieades.

Kirk was at the "Berm", and had a similar story. No usable recording in the bright sky.