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I notice they're using 'Direct spectroscopy' to do the measurements.
There was another thread in the Solar System Forum the other day where Titan occulted a double binary star system.
The notorious "mike Brown" of Caltech, ('the man who killed Pluto'), was involved in the analysis. In his paper, they used the 'light curve dipping', (meaning intensity, rather than spectroscopy), as a way to measure the temperature of Titan's atmosphere:
"The gradual drop of a star’s lightcurve at the point of immersion into the body’s atmosphere, and the subsequent rise at emersion, can be inverted to derive the local temperature and density profiles in the microbar pressure range. The primary cause of the dimming is differential refraction, effectively defocusing light rays in the plane of the local density gradient along the ray’s trajectory."
I wonder if they can do this for one that's 130 lyrs away ?
(Perhaps the spectrum method is already embedded in the lightcurve calculations ? They didn't go into that detail in the Titan occultation paper).
Cheers
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