Presentations of the
2010 Annual IOTA Meeting
December 3-5, 2010
Boston, MA area
(compiled by Brad Timerson)
provided by Richard Nugent, Exec. Secretary
Pictures taken during the Meeting
Saturday, 9:00 am (1400 UT)
David Dunham
New IOTA Server? (0.9 mb)
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Saturday, 9:05 am (1405 UT)
David Dunham
Presentation to Middle East section of IOTA (2.8 Mb)
Video Introduction (4 Mb wmv)
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Saturday, 9:15 am (1415 UT)
Terrence Redding
Presentation of the 2010 Homer Daboll Award to Hristo Pavlov (1.8 Mb)
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Saturday, 9:45 am (1445 UT)
Richard Nugent
Status of IOTA Publications (1.4 Mb)
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Saturday, 10:15 am (1515 UT)
Paul Maley, read by David Dunham
Report from the Vice President of IOTA (308 kb)
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Saturday, 10:30 am (1530 UT)
David Dunham
2011 Annual IOTA Meeting and the July 19 2011 Occultation by Double Asteroid (90) Antiope (0.5 mb)
Plans for the 2011 IOTA Annual Meeting in Rocklin, CA
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Saturday, 11:00 am (1600 UT)
Dave Herald
Occult Status, Analysis of lunar and asteroidal occultations (140 kb)
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Saturday, 1:00 pm (1800 UT)
David Dunham
Best Lunar and Asteroidal Occultations of 2011 (1.2 Mb)
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Saturday, 1:30 pm (1830 UT)
Frank Suits
The AllTimer Video System (1.2 Mb)
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Saturday, 2:00 pm (1900 UT)
Richard Nugent
A New Video Method to Measure Double Stars (6.2 Mb)
A new video method to measure double stars is presented. Using the same equipment as for an occultation observation,
the observer will video record a double star drift from the far left (west) side of the DVR/camcorder screen
to the far right (east) side (motor drive turned off) along with GPS time insertion. GPS time insertion means that an accurate time will be available for each video frame.
The drift should be fairly close to east-west, but need not be perfect. The offset from a true east-west drift will compensated for in the reduction.
With the freeware program LiMovie, it will record an (x,y) data point for each aperture ring (star) for each video frame as they drift.
For a 60 second video and a 30 frame/sec video recording rate, this means that LiMovie will generate (60 sec) x (30 frame/sec) = 1,800 (x,y) data pairs for analysis.
Typical scale factors for an optical systems will be in the range of 1 - 2 arc-second/pixel.
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Saturday, 2:40 pm (1940 UT)
Russ Genet
The Alt-Az Initiative Development of Portable and Affordable 1-meter class Telescopes (3.5 Mb)
The Alt-Az Initiative is developing portable, low cost, lightweight, meter-class telescopes that can be readily transported
to remote observing sites and quickly set up. These large aperture telescopes will allow occultations of much fainter
stars by solar system objects to be observed. For instance, a 40 inch (1 meter) portable telescope can observe
about 2.5 magnitudes fainter, and this translates into about 30 times the number of occultation events--
an especially important factor for rarer occultation events such as TNOs.
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Saturday, 3:00 pm (2000 UT)
Bruce Holenstein
The Alt-Az Initiative Efforts to Improve the Signal-to-Noise Ratio of Occultation Measures (1.5 Mb
Alt-Az Initiative members are building portable meter-class telescopes to improve the signal-to-noise-ratio of measures of objects under study.
A sufficient SNR for occultation measures makes it possible to understand previously latent features of the occulted object.
The talk reviews some of the current Alt-Az Initiative science interests and associated detector development projects
Teardown of a 28" "Light Bucket" (6Mb wmv)
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Saturday, 3:30 pm (2030 UT)
Steve Conard
Astronomical League Occultation Observing Club Proposal (0.6 Mb)
The Astronomical League (AL) has a large number of observing clubs, which are aimed at having amateur astronomers
become experienced in various types of specialized observations.
The AL would be interested in seeing IOTA propose an Occultation Club, similar to the AAVSO/AL Variable Star Club.
This presentation will help determine if IOTA should go forward with such a proposal,
what it should include as the observing
requirements, and who should lead the effort.
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Saturday, 3:45 pm (2045 UT)
Bruce Berger
A Brief Introduction to SCORE - the Self-Contained Occultation Recorder (3.4 Mb)
A newcomer to occultation recording, my first fully-equipped solo event was an lunar graze in January at 7:00 am local time.
What I found out was that the mess of cables necessary to interconnect the power-packs, cameras,
GPS and antennas weren’t well behaved when the temps are only 7°F (-14°C).
Being freezing and with winter-thick gloves only added more frustration to the mess.
In the end one cable snapped from the cold and all I could do was toss everything into the rear
of the car and sort it out back home. My solution is based on an idea posted by Hristo Pavlov –
a means to tame the cables, eliminate interconnections in the field,
and be able to fit everything back into a storage case after using it, even in sub-freezing temperatures.
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Saturday, 4:00 pm, (2100 UT)
Dave Gault
Report on Inaugural IOTA-ME Meeting
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Saturday, 4:15 pm (2115 UT)
Tony Barry, presented by Dave Gault via EVO
GPS-VTI Development (1.1 Mb)
Developed by Tony Barry (Sydney, Australia)
this new Video Time Inserter is based on 3 readily
available modules; a microcontroller, a video titler and a GPS. In addition, 2
LEDs, a switch, some
wires, a case to house it all and an afternoon with a soldering iron is
required. Tony's code is
loaded into the microcontroller using free software. Independent testing is yet
to be arranged but early testing looks promising.
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Saturday, 4:30 pm (2130 UT)
Dave Gault
Grazing Occultation Analysis and Archive Project (6.9 Mb)
The Archive of Lunar Grazes was reviewed to; consolidate all historical records previously held separately by individuals and organisations into one archive,
restore previously lost observer names and telescope details in the period 1960-1974, find and correct obvious errors,
flag erroneous observations, and to find and recreate previously unreported graze reports so that they can be included in the archive.
Finally to ensure the complete archive is archived at “Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg” and that it is available through the VizieR service.
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Sunday, 9:15 am (1415 UT)
David Dunham
French Observations of the July 2010 Solar Eclipse
1. Prado Results (20 Mb)
2. Koutchmy (5 Mb)
3. Bazin (6 Mb)
4. Mouette (6 Mb)
5. Sigismondi (4 Mb)
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Sunday, 10:00 am (1500 UT)
Richard Nugent
IOTA Observations of the July 2010 Solar Eclipse (1.6 Mb)
The International Occultation Timing Association (IOTA) was present at this eclipse as part of its long term study to measure solar radius variations.
IOTA astronomers Paul Maley, Richard Nugent and Chuck Herold traveled to 2 Atolls in the South Pacific in the French Polynesia and set up two stations - Hikueru Atoll and Hao Atoll.
Unfortunately the Hikueru station had cloud/rain problems immediately after 2nd contact. This was Maley's 38th eclipse expedition, Herold's 17th and Nugent's 21st.
IOTA's method of planning eclipse stations normally places them at the north and south eclipse limits, however the path of this eclipse was just about entirely over water
so Nugent/Herold and Maley set up on complementary sides of the center line: Maley at Hikueru just 10km north
of the eclipse center line and Nugent/Herold at Hao 70 km south of the center line.
The goal was to observe the lunar mountains race across the Sun at 2nd and 3rd contact - the diamond ring effect caused by Baily's Beads -
the breaking up sunlight caused by the lunar mountains, deep valleys and craters at the edge of the Moon.
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Sunday, 10:45 am (1545 UT)
David Dunham
Accuracy of Solar Radius Determination (1.7 Mb)
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Sunday, 1:00 pm (1800 UT)
David Dunham
History of Multiple Station Deployments (19 Mb)
Sample video showing quick step reappearance (0.1 second duration) (278 Mb)
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Sunday, 2:00 pm (1900 UT)
John Wright (presented by D. Dunham)
WWVB-Based Video Marker System (1.9 mb)
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Sunday, 2:50 pm (1950 UT)
Scotty Degenhardt via EVO
Io and Europa Atmosphere and Io Torus Detection through Occultations and Conjunctions (8 Mb)
While taking several tens of minutes of wing data surrounding an occultation of Europa by Io in 2009 during that Jupiter Mutual Event (JME) cycle,
an anomaly was detected in the lightcurve prior to and following the actual occultation.
Analysis of this anomaly led to the hypothesis that it was the result of atmospheric extinction of the light from the occulted moon by the atmosphere of Io.
The same anomaly was then found when Europa was an occulting body. Occultations by Ganymede showed no dimming anomaly.
A study was launched to determine the source of this phenomenon we named Jovian Extinction Events (JEE). (Full Abstract here.)
Simulation Video Clip (0.5 Mb)
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Please report any errors or omissions to Brad Timerson