Occultation’s

Hi

Has anyone done any work on recording Occultation’s by video means? As you are probably aware there is an occultation of Venus by the Moon in daylight on the afternoon of June 18th.
I was planning on recording this event (weather permitting of course) just as matter of experimentation and curiosity using the following methods / equipment…
Semi Professional Video camera with 20x optical zoom lens (output to PC).
Atom time Pro software (Atomic timing and video frame rate stamp)
Video frame capture software (digital recording of event, PAL 25fps), works in conjunction with Atom time pro for high accuracy timing.
Laptop PC
Sturdy Tripod

I was thinking of setting up on the grounds a well known College in Dublin, there might be some scientific value if all goes well, so if anyone is interested or can offer me advice they would be most welcome, would love to chat about life, the universe and everything.

Btw
Many thanks for the advice on video capture of the recent Lunar Eclipse. I manged to record this event digitally using similar set-up with excellent results!

Clear skies
Mike

Mike,

There is something tomorrow morning as well involving the Moon and Uranus. For me, it occurs around 8:30 UT+3 and the sun is quite dominant at that time which rules out any attempt on my side.

Perhaps you have better conditions for a successful capture.

Thanks Anthony I will look into this!

Clear Skies
Mike

Mike, There is something tomorrow morning as well involving the Moon and Uranus. For me, it occurs around 8:30 UT+3

:

Hi Mike,

I have done some occultation work using a video camera with STV time stamper. Origially tried analogue but have converted to digital. This would be occultations of asteroids by stars.

I am using digital with STV time stamp with a Garmin 16 GPS.

I also use a CCD camera for occultation work. For example I attempted last night to record a mutual event of Protoclus and it's moon. There were two events. First the occultation of Protoclus by its moon which took 2.5 hrs and then it's moon creating a shadow on Protoclus which ended at 02.45 am today.

The idea being to see if the predicted time is different from the real event.

A more challenging occultation are extrasolar planets. I got a successful recording of Gl 581 last week using a CCD camera. The predicted transit of 'b' didn't happen. This may mean that the inclination is much smaller.
See results in forum under Cosmology & Physics (Extrasolar Earth like planet'. It would have been very useful if the transit occurred because the mass and inclination of 'b' may have resulted in calculating 'c', the Earth like planet.

I am planning to work on future occultations of binary asteroids this year and mutual events of the Uranium satellites.

Eamonn A

Hi Eamonn

Thank you for the information, I have access to a GPS system as well as the items I listed in my previous post. This attempt by me at occultation work is purely experimental; hopefully I may be able to get some very accurate results of scientific value and hopefully good images as well. An important aspect I forgot to mention was the fun factor of finding out if it all works.
I think I picked an easy target in the Moon and Venus, even in daylight this should not cause a problem (cloud will however)!
Is their an official organisation or body in Ireland where I can send my results (if any) to?
That’s very interesting work Eamonn, is this the first attempt from Ireland at imaging and analysing a transit of an extrasolar planet?

Clear skies
Mike