Monday @ TTSO10

[tonybarry]

Waiting for the tenth Trans-Tasman Symposium on Occultations to start. A good crowd, some faces from previous occultations that I have only corresponded with via email / internet.

First up is Steve Kerr from North Queensland, highlights of planetary occultations in Aus /NZ.

The image is of a light curve from an occultation with an unusual graze.

Regards,
Tony Barry
WSAAG

[tonybarry]

Murray Forbes from New Zealand with a talk on finding true double stars rather than optical stars (unrelated gravitationally).

[tonybarry]

David Dunham from the USA, on a multistation deployment of small telescopes to record occultations in the Northern Territiory. One telescope station was attacked, presumably by a dingo.

[tonybarry]

Dave Herald with a talk on the astrometric survey of Gaia, which promises to make occultation predictions an order of magnitude more precise in position and time.

[tonybarry]

Now a discussion of errors in timing by David Dunham from multi-station occultation observing. The video time inserter is not sufficiently low cost to be able to be deployed with each station, so each unattended system (scope, camcorder) is reliant on the integrity of the internal camcorder clock. As the night continues, temperature drops; this is known to affect the timing elements in camcorders.

[Robh]

Hi Tony,

Sounds like it was a really interesting day.

Thanks for the updates, Rob

[AstralTraveller]

Thanks for posting the summary Tony. I was able to get to Sunday and Monday and enjoyed both immensely.

This asteroid occultation research is heaps cool. You can do much-needed research that the professionals, with their limited number of fixed observatories, simply can't. Directly measuring the size of of an asteroid is impressive but measuring the density profile of Pluto's atmosphere or the size of a TNO is unreal. It's a pity that there are so few observers in Australia: the Americans and Europeans can muster enough observers to get some highly detailed outlines of the size and shape of asteroids.

[gregbradley]

Also Rick Stevenson gave an excellent workshop on PixInsight. Mysterious arcane knowedge it is no longer!

Greg.

[RickS]

Thanks, Greg!

[tonybarry]

Hi David,

Occultation observing is one of the areas where amateurs are actively encouraged by professionals to contribute (and are acknowledged on the author lists of collaborative academic papers).

Astrojunk (Jonathan from Brissy) has the current distance record for an occultation of Eris, at about 98 AU.

In the recent Pluto (June 2015) occultation (visible from Tassie and NZ, with Blueskies (Jacquie from Melb) getting a grazing atmosphere recording) there were more than 30 amateurs and more than 50 total stations involved.

Some of the Pluto teams came from overseas, but many were home grown. I hope that more folk can get the idea and move into the field - it is much less costly than astrophotography, with much more usable results for humanity in general.

Now we just need to deal with the digital revolution.

Regards,
Tony Barry
WSAAG

[DJT]

+1 from me too:thumbsup: got to be the best $90 I have ever spent in this hobby.

Thanks Rick and also to Geoff who provided support.