This is a challenging event. The drop is only 0.6 magnitude. The risk is that you have saturated pixels and therefore lose the ability to see 0.06 mag drop. But Psyche is bright and easy to find in this case. It'll look like a bright star where it looks very faint on C2A. Psyche is a high value target in that it is the destination of a Space Mission and has an unusually high density and is very likely to be made of a lot of metal. The path is very side, but Santa Cruz is not far inside the northern limit, so our data, if we succeed, will be helpful in refining the orbit.
Strategy: Turn the gain down on your camera and expose at 1x and hope that the sheer number of points in the occultation will permit a detection in PyOTE. You won't see anything on your screen. It would be best if you could even get test data before the event and run it through PyMovie enough to see the red pixels if they are there. Think in terms like this: What integration would I need to comfortably see the occultation of a 12.6 star? I'd say 8x would give a good signa. So, put it on 8x in your Watec and then dial down the gain so that the lettering in the tenths of a second part of the time stamps are a similar level of gray to your star. Short of pre-testing, this is probably the best way to avoid saturated pixels.
Kirk Bender and I succeeded on a similar bright asteroid / faint star event by Eunomia, when we were at MIRA one day before our first Quaoar event there. It was actually quite easy to see on even the 14" Planewave scope which I used, and much more so on the 36" scope Kirk was on. So, there's hope.
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I got a recording from the foot of the driveway. To maximize S/N, I set the integration to 8x, suitable to get good S/N for a typical 12.6 mag star complete disappearance. Then I reduced the gain to 29 from its usual max=41, to avoid saturated pixels but preserve the S/N. The low altitude did make for variations at the 10% level of the target star. I knew the predicted event time and location of our sites on the well-predicted path, and expected an event in the 5-7 second duration area and 6% light loss. There was such a dip, but to get PyOTE detection, I had to strongly trim the light curve. The resulting detection was at the 3.4 sigma NIE level. 5.7s duration. I also set the recording contrast in IOTA VC2.4 at about the 30% level to reduce scatter, and adjusted recording brightness a bit to further insure reduced chance of saturated pixels. Indeed there were no saturated pixels in the recording of the target or ref, and the sky was quite dark, even given the 8x setting and the full moon only 19 degrees away, over the city lights of Santa Cruz. I used a large 6px mask to be sure to include every photon from the target and ref star. The signal got better he longer I set the smoothing length. Indeed, during the day, the sky was completely cloudless and very clear, and seemed to remain that way all night as well. Not using the fainter reference star at all was optimum.
magDrop report: percentDrop: 6.5 magDrop: 0.073 +/- 0.028 (0.95 ci)
DNR: 1.00
D time: [02:56:44.9365]
D: 0.6800 containment intervals: {+/- 0.5423} seconds
D: 0.9500 containment intervals: {+/- 2.0147} seconds
D: 0.9973 containment intervals: {+/- 5.1346} seconds
R time: [02:56:50.6965]
R: 0.6800 containment intervals: {+/- 0.5423} seconds
R: 0.9500 containment intervals: {+/- 2.0147} seconds
R: 0.9973 containment intervals: {+/- 5.1346} seconds
Duration (R - D): 5.7600 seconds
Duration: 0.6800 containment intervals: {+/- 0.9684} seconds
Duration: 0.9500 containment intervals: {+/- 2.8388} seconds
Duration: 0.9973 containment intervals: {+/- 6.4763} seconds
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My results for Psyche, I got a rough 13.8 sec. event. I recorded at 8x at Westlake park, I turned the gain down to 9 but the target was still far above background. I tried a nest of aperture sizes in PyMovie and most of the results were very similar, size 3.2 gave slightly better results in PyOTE. There was only one other star visible, but it was dim so I used the target for tracking. In PyOTE I didn't normalize on the reference star, it was dim and the sky was clear that night. The target curve was noisy, but PyOTE found an event and I didn't have to trim the curve. I used min/max and PyOTE found a 13.8 sec event with magdrop of 0.115 The containment intervals are wide, but NIE sigma was 3.1 and the event is centered on the predicted time. It doesn't match RN's preliminary results but that's what I got.
magDrop report: percentDrop: 10.1 magDrop: 0.115 +/- 0.033 (0.95 ci)
DNR: 0.64
D time: [02:56:38.0173]
D: 0.6800 containment intervals: {+/- 1.5460} seconds
D: 0.9500 containment intervals: {+/- 5.7538} seconds
D: 0.9973 containment intervals: {+/- 14.4442} seconds
R time: [02:56:51.8976]
R: 0.6800 containment intervals: {+/- 1.5460} seconds
R: 0.9500 containment intervals: {+/- 5.7538} seconds
R: 0.9973 containment intervals: {+/- 14.4442} seconds
Duration (R - D): 13.8803 seconds
Duration: 0.6800 containment intervals: {+/- 2.7478} seconds
Duration: 0.9500 containment intervals: {+/- 8.0425} seconds
Duration: 0.9973 containment intervals: {+/- 17.7982} seconds
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RN: At Westlake Park, Kirk was about a mile north of me, and so he was farther from the centerline. So, his event should be shorter than 5s, or mine should be longer than 13s, so indeed these two formal D and R sets don't agree. However, given the wide 2-sigma timing limits, they can be considered consistent. The other thing is, Kirk's profile almost looks like two events, like a graze.