Originally we were going to do an Occultation timing study on Oct 19th with the
moon and a star. One of our newest members, Paul Maley, who is an expert doing
occultation timings, has determined that it would be of little scientific
importance. Therefore he would like volunteers to help him with a star -
asteroid occultation on October 4th. He suggests that we drive down I-10 to
several stations where he will help us set up small telescopes. There is a free
app called "Time the Sat" that can be downloaded to your cell phone to help
with precise timings. While one person can do each station, it would be easier
and more fun if we had 2 people at each station. Therefore, we can use several
volunteers. Last time we tried to do an occultation timing event, we had Rick,
Sam, Don, Paul Facuna and maybe one or two others as interested volunteers but
we got clouded out. On Oct 4th, Paul Maley will take the southern most station
south of Casa Grande and our volunteers will be north of him about 10 km
apart. He needs a total of 5 stations. The occultation is about 11:07 pm so
we need to be at our stations about an hour ahead of that to set up. Hopefully
Ted Blank, another PAS member with occultation expertise will also help us out.
The star TYC 6978-00853-1 will be occulted by the 15th largest asteroid 451
Patientia (225 km in diameter) in the asteroid belt.
Anyway, if you can help out in doing this citizen science project, please reply
to this email so we can then assign positions and set up carpools. It sounds
like a fun experience and I hope we get lots of PAS members to try this out.
I suggest that Terri remove the Oct 19th Occultation from our PAS calendar and
put in this Oct 4th Occultation with a place for rsvps.
Take care, Sam Insana President of PAS
