The Occultation of a W=15.6 Star by Trojan Asteroid (15440) Eioneus

Fri eve Feb 21, 2025 at 9:01:10pm

OWc page , RECON page , LuckyStar page

RECON chart

This is a difficult event, but the LS page's path goes right down the San Francisco Peninsula and we're in the uncertainty zone here. It's on a weekend evening and worth a try if we can get long integration. I will see if I can get the 12" at Cabrillo Observatory set up with the Watec.

However, the OWc path claims higher confidence limits, and stays entirely off the CA coast; nominally far enough away to discourage any attempt. I'm puzzled how it's possible to have confidence limits on each path that are rather narrow and optimistic, but which completely exclude each other's 1-sigma zones.

Marc Buie of RECON has provided a deeper explanation of orbit predictions from the various groups, which I should link in some form here - but the bottom line is that LuckyStar's predictions are the ones to bet on, and now OWc, if they differ. With that, I will then get to Cabrillo Observatory at 6pm and try to get the Watec to focus in a way that allows it to move inside of our tight dome, and also doesn't require major change to get our CCD camera back on for student photography work.

Magnitude drop: OWc says 0.7 mag, duration = 4.27s

"r" mag of target is 15.5 in C2A. RECON says apparent magnitude of star is 14.7, which doesn't make good sense, except it looks on the charts like the target is part of a close double of similar brightness. Anyway, the asteroid is brighter than the target, so the drop will be partial. Be sure it's well enough visible to see a partial drop.

   

 

Results:

I made a bone-head mistake, and didn't realize theeh event was Friday night, not Saturday night. It was clear Friday night, but I was chasing two other asteroid events at this time. No data...