Hello RECON members. I’ll be busy with family visits this month, so I will keep my February alert list short and sweet. Here is the list of events that cross RECON member site locations in February:

These are all high probability events.  That is, if you are in the path or near the path, you have a very good chance of observing an occultation.  If we can get three or more RECON teams to observe each event, we can derive a good estimate of the size and shape of the asteroid, like was done for the Aegle event last year.  Also, all these events will be observed by IOTA observers in addition to RECON teams, so there is potential for several chords on each event.

All these events can be found on the OccultWatcher website.  For each event, if you click on the ‘View Details on Web’ menu button along the bottom of the screen, you can find a link to Steve Preston’s website for the event.  This website has links to path maps, and star charts.  On the path map is the ‘of date’ coordinates needed for pointing to the target star.

Here is the above list by date showing the RECON teams that are within or near the occultation path, along with recommended Mallincam settings:

For all these events, except the February 16 event, the occultation should be clearly visible on-screen as a star disappearance.  For February 16, the event will appear as a slight fading of the target star.  All observations will require video processing to derive the Disappearance and Reappearance times.

For all events, I suggest you upload your videos to the IOTA RECON Dropbox site.  If you have not already signed up to share this site and plan to observe one of these events, let me know and I’ll send you a link to the website for sharing/uploading the video files.

Once the videos are analyzed, I’ll work with each team to produce an IOTA report for submission to IOTA.

Good luck if you try any of these events in February 2016!