This was the last event for February posted by Tony George.  The event ocurred early evening on Feb 25 at around 7:38 PM (PST).  Predicted event time was 03:38:34 UT February 26th.  The target star (11.6 mag.) for the occultation was low in the west at 27 deg altitude and in the constellation Pisces.  The predicted maximum duration was 1.6 seconds at the predicted centerline.  On the Occult Watcher prediction map my location was just outside (2 km) on the south side of the shadow path in the 1 sigma zone.  I had previously contacted Red Sumner at the Jack C. Davis Observatory to see if he could possibly observe.  The observatory was only a few kilometers off the predicted centerline.  Although partly cloudy most of the afternoon, the clouds started to clear by early evening and there appeared to be a good chance for an observations.  Scope setup went quickly, but just before event time a small patch of cirrus moved over the field stars.  I set the camera integration to 8X and the VirtualDub timer program to record for 5 minutes centered around the predicted time. Then it was just to hope for the best.  Sure enough, the clouds cleared and almost exactly at the predicted time I observed a short ‘wink’ of the target star.  A follow-up analysis by LiMovie confirmed an approx. 1.7 second occultaion event.  Tony George was gracious enough to provide a formal R-OTE analysis as seen below.

The actual camera and VTI corrected duration was 1.670320 seconds.  This event turned out to be one that could have been observed by as many as three RECON sites (Gardnerville, Yerington, and perhaps Hawthorne).  It appears though that, as of this writing, I was the only positive observer.  A formal report was filed with the IOTA using the OW IOTA Reporting plug-in which uses a simple Excel spreadsheet format.

Reported IOTA occultation results for all of North America can be viewed at : http://www.asteroidoccultation.com/observations/Results/