This is a decent event with medicore rank and quite observable in our good weather and dark of the moon. North -> South path nicely separates Kirk and My and Bernard's sites inside the path. Karl not in path but given the rank and past experience, it could be a valuable "miss" even if a miss.
Alt=58, Az=204 in Cetus, 6 degrees below the right edge of the tail
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I recorded from home outside my carport. The star was fainter than I expected at 2x, so I went with 4x. It looked like a miss as I watched on the computer screen. Indeed, during the reasonable event period it was a miss. However, there was a single point drop to zero 18 diameters later, at 5:55:54.8982 on the PyOTE time listing. PyOTE says a drop of 4.8 mag for 0.08 seconds was detectable. The NIE curve that it gave had only 1.4 sigma of significance. A visual look at the aperture box at that time shows a faint detection of the star it seems, so it was not a tracking error. But was it a real occultation? It's a marginal detection at best, and rather far from the main asteroid at 18 diameters. The light curve point before the zero point was also low, but not significantly low. The duration of ~0.08s is 1/25th the diameter of the main asteroid and so it no competition for being the main object.
I think it will remain as an asteroid point of note, and I will report a miss with the qualification notes in the comments.
Start 5:54:30 UT, End=5:56:52 UT
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Kirk Bender's 8SE light curve near the time of my single point drop to zero. No real evidence of an event. I filed the report as a miss.. |
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This image is from PyMovie on the time nearest to the time stamp on PyOTE of the drop to zero point. The image shows a faint image of the star remains. Is that because the star was gone for less than an integration, and it's only a noisy sky subtraction that made for a zero point? Perhaps. In any case, I'm unconvinced this 'event' is real. |
For Pinotti on Dec.12, I set up he Astrid at home, 5fps (12x), and the Watec at Westlake, 2x. Both got misses. For the Astrid, station 1, PyOTE detectability test said an event as short as 0.600s would likely be detectable, max predicted was 2.2s. For the Watec, station 2, PyOTE detectability test said an event as short as 0.170s would likely be detectable.
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