Occultation of iota Cancri by (411) Xanthe April 18 UT by Don Luftus - New 2007 April 18, 21h UT

From: Don Loftus [dloftus@ufl.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2007 10:50 AM
To: cohen@astro.ufl.edu
Subject: Re: Iota Occultation Results

Hey Everybody,

Glad to see the reports coming in.  Here's mine.

I was able to catch the Iota Occultation last night with my Meade 
10-in. SCT from my vineyard property.  The sky was clear with some 
scattered high mist, but it did not interfere with the viewing.  I 
had set up the night before for a dry run and, because of that, was 
able to locate the star by 8:10 p.m. 

Originally I was going to use a video camera to capture my verbal 
report of "out" and "in" but decided to see if the star was visible 
in the camera through the telescope - it was!.  I was using a Sony 
TRV 730 Digital 8 camera and recorded on Hi8 video tape.  I had to 
hand hold the camera to the 40mm eyepiece for about 10 minutes and 
the image bounces just a bit. 

I had my Sony short wave radio hooked up and was tuned into WWV at 
10Mhz.  Reception was in and out a bit, but I have a good signal in 
several areas, enough to make a good count.  I had the star blink 
out at about 8:56:11 local time and was out for about 2:03 seconds 
from mid fade to mid brighten.   My location is 29.8N and 82.37W. 

After that I spent some time looking at M46 trying to see the 
planetary nebula in the star cluster, but by then some haze was 
rolling in.  While doing the occultation I also had a chance to 
water the vineyard, so it was a good evening. 

Here's a 1.5-megabyte MPEG-4 video clip that I made this morning.
It may be better to download the file and play it offline rather 
than just trying to play it directly from this Web link.

Don Loftus
Alachua Astronomy Club