Asteroid Occultation Observations
Occulting Asteroid Star Occulted Date Time Link to Report Total Lunar Occultation Observations
Star Occulted Date Time Link to Report Grazing Lunar Occultation Observations
Grazing Star Date Time Link to Report My Equipment
For my 2020 birthday, Barbara surprised me with the International Occultation Timing Association's (IOTA) asteroid capture camera and GPS Time inserter.
The camera is an astronomy grade, low light Night Eagle 2 Pro camera.
The wiring insturctions are as follows (click image for a larger view):
The asteroid capture kit also came with the Video Time Inserter (VTI).
This device will put the GPS time on the image, so I can time the asteroid event to 1/30th of a second. Instead of a PC to capture the video of an asteroid occulting a star, I will use our digital Super 8 camcorder.
This will make the operation very portable.
So you might ask, what am I about to do? If you are in the right spot on earth, you can watch an asteroid pass in front of a star. The star will wink off and then back on, as the asteroid, a much closer object to earth, blots out the starlight.
By noting where your location is on earth, and the time duration the star winked out, this data can be used to deduce the shape of the asteroid. If several observers are making observations of the same asteroid and star, you can trace the shape of it by each observation. Below is the asteroid and with many observers timing the disappearance and reappearance from their location. By combining their timing observations, the shape of the asteroid is revealed.
This information helps professional astronomers in their research of asteroids.
