Hi all,
After several years work I am pleased to announce that the first edition of the manual for recording occultations on video, titled "Observing Occultations Using Video: A Beginner's Guide", has finally gone live. Written under the banner of the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand's Occultation Section you can download a copy for your use at section's website at
www.occultations.org.nz The website has recently shifted to a new host so if you haven't visited it in the last two weeks you will need to update your bookmarks.
I am currently in Invercargill, NZ, for the 7th Trans Tasman Symposium on Occultations (TTSO7) where we will have a discussion and feedback session on the document. Initial feedback from both experienced and inexperienced observers has been positive and I hope have a revised version out before the end of the year, or at least before NACAA 2014 next Easter.
In the meantime I invite you to have a read of the document and consider giving occultation work a go. It's far more than just trying to determine the shape of an asteroid these days; other contributions to the world body of knowledge include helping to refine asteroid orbits, refining the positions of stars, studying the atmospheres of planetary bodies to discovering and measuring the position angles of close binary stars via lunar occultations. Occultation work is also playing a major role in the New Horizons mission to Pluto, both in monitoring the current state of Pluto's atmospere and refining its orbit, which surprisingly is still not known exactly - at least not exact enough to precisely fly a space probe past it.