(656) Beagle occultation timed at Goddard Observatory
New: 2002 November 26The occultation of 11.7-mag. TYC 1294-02155-1 by 656 Beagle was video recorded with Alan Fiala's Watec camera set up on the 16-inch telescope at the Goddard Optical Facility, about 15 miles northwest of downtown Washington, DC, by Wayne H. Warren, Jr. The duration was only about 1.5 seconds, indicating that he was near one of the limits, probably the southern, which would be in close agreement with Steve Preston's latest prediction. But without another observation, we can not be sure that he was not near the northern limit, instead, since the 1-sigma path uncertainty was more than a path-width. We hope that someone else in the path from central Baja California to northern Egypt timed the occultation so that we can know, and get a better estimate of the diameter of this approximately 50-km object. The weather satellite images show rather poor conditions everywhere west of Goddard, but clear skies over Baltimore, northeastern Maryland, northern Delaware, southern New Jersey, and across Iberia (the path crossed northern Portugal; just s. of Madrid; and near Valencia, Spain). Twilight was probably too strong in northern Egypt and the Sinai; a large weather system over central Europe covered the path with thick clouds over n. Tunisia and Malta. The weather forecast was consistently poor for central Maryland and the DC area, so I did not send out my usual reminder message for this event. But the heavy clouds stayed mainly in the mountains to our west, although earlier there were lots of cirrus clouds in the area that made it impossible to observe the occultation of an 11.5-mag. star by 1159 Granada from north-central Maryland about 3 hours earlier in the evening. I would have missed trying for the Beagle event myself if Wayne had not phoned me about 1.5 hours before the occultation to say that it had cleared up. When I left my office in n.w. Laurel, the northern and western sky were filled with high clouds, and I assumed that they would move east and spoil the show. In fact they did after I arrived home in Greenbelt and set up my telescope; I was able to align and focus on the Moon, but Saturn and the Beagle field stayed covered so that I could not aim the telescope, until less than 4 minutes before the event, when the clouds finally moved off at my location. I made a quick better alignment and focusing with beta Tauri, then moved south, finding zeta and then 108 Tauri, and then I moved east from there with my video field and found 3 stars that might enclose the target star, this occurring close to the time of the event. But two minutes later, I checked the area more closely, and discovered that two of the three stars were right, but not the third one; the target was only 0.2 fields outside of my field - very frustrating for me - if it had only cleared up a couple of minutes earlier, I would have figured that out. At the optical site three miles to my northeast, it had cleared up earlier, and with the fixed telescope's setting circles, Wayne was able to acquire the target star quickly. David Dunham