This event would normally be an easy and high confidence get. But it happens with the sun at only -8 altitude so twilight will be the challenge. Alt=27, Az=115 in Aquila, about 12 degrees below/right of Altair. Get your 2-star align done ASAP in twilight and go-to target. Duration only 0.6s. Karl is on centerline pretty much. Good odds at Pineridge ant Sunlit lane too. Marine layer the night before was at 2,000 ft, so that might come in play as well.
Weather turned out to be fine, even in Santa Cruz...
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Skies were clear from Santa Cruz. I was "under the weatther" and the difficulty of the task had me at first intent on skipping entirely. But Kirk and Karl were game to try it, so I felt duty-bound to at least get a possibly useful "miss" from home, given how the formal path accuracies are not as good as advertised anyway. And, I was curious if sun=-8 would be entirely fatal. I observed from my carport. Got a 2-star align with Vega and Altair, did a GoTo and immediately recognized the two bright stars near the bottom of the eyepiece chart which told me I had a very good GoTo. I shold have waited to see if there was any drift from there, but at this point there was only 7 minutes till the event, so I instead just swapped out the eyepiece for the Watec and powered up the laptop and OccBox and, use the brightness control in the IOTA VC 2.4 to dial down the blindingly white pixels. Still not successful until I also dialed the Watec down to 1x setting. Then I could see stars. Focused, and.... could not ID any patterns. The stars turns out had been drifting upward quite a bit during all this. I did not get on-target until 4 minutes after the event. The target was then visible, and might have been above-sky at event time too. But, just not enough time to get this one done.
Set up from home. Could not ID the field in the bright twilight, could see only one star at event time. No data
I got a 0.3337s event for 2001 DW78, 2x from the BD Eco reserve on July 29. There was twilight and I turned the gain down to see the target. I started late but in time for the event. At first glance the curve didn't look like there was an event, but PyOTE found one near the predicted time. I tried several mask sizes and 2.0 gave the best results. It's noisy, DNR is low, but the NIE sigma distance is 3.5.
magDrop report: percentDrop: 78.8 magDrop: 1.685 +/- 0.821 (0.95 ci)
DNR: 1.70
D time: [03:57:04.5762]
D: 0.6800 containment intervals: {+/- 0.0192} seconds
D: 0.9500 containment intervals: {+/- 0.0850} seconds
D: 0.9973 containment intervals: {+/- 0.1936} seconds
R time: [03:57:04.9099]
R: 0.6800 containment intervals: {+/- 0.0192} seconds
R: 0.9500 containment intervals: {+/- 0.0850} seconds
R: 0.9973 containment intervals: {+/- 0.1936} seconds
Duration (R - D): 0.3337 seconds
Duration: 0.6800 containment intervals: {+/- 0.0326} seconds
Duration: 0.9500 containment intervals: {+/- 0.0995} seconds
Duration: 0.9973 containment intervals: {+/- 0.2163} seconds