419 Aurelia occults mag. 11.2 star - Saturday Night 8th Jan.

[DaveGee (Dave Gault)]

There is a beaut event for 11:52pm (Sydney time) Saturday night. See...

http://www.asteroidoccultation.com/2...3398_MapAU.gif

Of course we need more observers and stations than the 4 and 5 already announced on Occult Watcher.

This is a perfect event for the Auckland and Adelaide regions as well as Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong, Bathurst and Mudgee regions.

Ideally, you will need a good access to Universal Time (UT) - GPS with 1PPS, Beeper Box synchronised with BeeperSync, shortwave radio tuned to WWVH, however, for those lacking a good UT timebase, simply report the event duration to the best of your ability, the aproximate event times based on NTP time servers or a GPS, and your geographic coordinates.

C'mon, the more the merrier!

[tonybarry (Tony)]

Yes mate I'll stare at Aurelia. Love those heavenly bodies.

Regards,
Tony Barry

[tonybarry (Tony)]

Clouded over 2 minutes before the occultation was expected. Hmmm. Bad planning there, my boy.

Next time.

Regards,
Tony Barry

[lepton3 (Ivan)]

We had broken cloud here all the way up to the event time, so it was really difficult to get the telescope set up and aligned properly. Add to that a problem with the preparation of the finder chart (it was printed mirror imaged and reversed!), and we didn't start the drift image capture until too late. Anyhow, here it is:



You can see it was not a complete loss, we still got the end time of the event, and an upper bound on the start time. From manual measurement of the drift image, we got Tstart < 12:53:34.5 UT and Tend = 12:53:37 +/- 0.5s UT.

Our location was S 34 53 04.2 E 138 37 51.3, Elev 44 m.

Perhaps the data point is of some scientific value. I wish we had got the image started even just 10 seconds earlier!

Anyway, there's always next time!

-Ivan

[DaveGee (Dave Gault)]

That is great Ivan. Please send your report to John Talbot...
john.talbot@xtra.co.nz

The report form is here... http://occsec.wellington.net.nz/

John will combine your positive end time with Dave Herald's D and R event times to refine the path of the shadow.