This is a very difficult event and very likely to result in a miss. But, high value in that a positive will greatly improve the orbit, and TNO occultations aren't that common.
Coordinates at date
RA=9h 26 41.0s
Dec=+12 13 24
UCAC4 512-047588
J2000 coordinates
RA=9h 25 14.08
Dec=+12 20 16.4"
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Kirk, Bernard and I all were going to give it a try.
I had Astro 8A to wrap up on this night; a clear night with astrophotography going past the usual closing time. And, trying to get gear together for Jordan's OccBox preparation. Got home, didn't have charts as I didn't know about this event until too late to prepare them. I teach all afternoon and evening on Tuesday night. I rushed to make charts and then observed from outside my carport. ID'ing star field was hindered by forgetting to flip the Q70 eyepiece chart in my rush. I did manage to find the target, after putting in the Watec, but not ready to record until juat about 2 minutes before the predicted event time. I then kept going till 12:46:11am or thereabouts. The target was visible on most integrations (32x setting) and I feel confident that a multi=seconds event would be detectable Skies were clean and dry, seeing only "ok".
For a 5.9 sec event, that's 10 integrations. A random positive would have a ~88% probability of lasting at least 2 seconds or 5 integrations and not be a "graze", assuming a circular outline. This event looks to be a very high probability "miss", in agreement with Kirk Bender and other Central CA observers.
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The noise was pretty well correlated over this long 32x = 0.6s integration duration. It smooths over the typical seeing variance time scale of about 0.1s quite significantly, so that the minimum metric was reached immediately, at a smoothing length of only 2 integrations. |
A full duration event is penciled in for reference. |
I got a miss for 2014 UW224, the TNO on Feb 4, 32x from home. Not unexpected, odds and rank were very low. PyOTE detectability tool reported an event as short as 1.1s would likely be detectable, max predicted was 5.86s.
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