Thank you for the kudos, Jonathan. Not sure how much I deserve. If Geoff H had not ceased production of KIWI-OSD I'd never have gone down the rabbit hole with IOTA-VTI. That is for sure. And Dave G has provided enormous amounts of quality assurance which was horribly irritating at the time but it ended up Making Things Better. So it is a team effort.
Dean, the paper which first described the rings of Chariklo can be found here:-
http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.7259
The telescope which provided most of the confidence that the rings existed was a 1m device ... with unfortunately poor timing (unexplained offsets of 1.6 sec, or about 35km at Chariklo). However, it would appear this was known, and a smaller (0.4m) telescope in the same facility (but with known good timekeeping ability) also was used to observe the occultation. They were able to normalise absolute times by blending the observations together, and the high temporal resolution of the Big Scope produced a wonderful light curve which nailed down the rings pretty well.
The moral of the story is that more observers for a given event produce a very much more confident result.
Jonathan's scope is a 350mm f/2 SCT, which was working at the limits of observability given the star's magnitude and the poor seeing ... but even so appears to have nailed the rings pretty well (the professionals will make pronouncement on this, but it looks fairly suspicious).
John Broughton in South Queensland observed a miss, but even that was of great use in establishing that the path of Chariklo was well north of the prediction.
So the replication of results (to provide greater certainty) in this case is not often done by finer time-slices, which requires much bigger scopes. It is done by more observers looking at the same event from different perspectives.
It is also a real blast to help out the professional astronomers. I have learned a lot from such associations, and I am sure that others have too.
If you'd like to know more about occultations, have a read of Blueskies" (Jacquie M) excellent Occultation Handbook.
Regards,
Tony Barry