Occult Watcher (OW) is an extremely useful tool developed by the IOTA community for tracking and signing up to participate in occultation campaigns.  The software for OW has been installed on all of the Netbooks that were shipped out to our sites last month.

We have created two guides to help you sign up for our upcoming (1332) Marconia campaign:

Setting up Occult Watcher for the First Time

Signing up for an Event in Occult Watcher

Thanks in advance for using these two guides to sign up for the Marconia campaign. You can also send an email to recon@calpoly.edu if you have any questions or concerns about this procedure.

For more information on tonight’s lunar eclipse, visit:

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/27mar_tetrad/

I had a wonderful road trip the week of March 24 to our southern RECON sites.  Below is a map of the week-long trek to Bishop, Tonopah, Hawthorne, and Yerington.

Route of roadtrip made by John Keller during Spring 2014

First I met up with Adrian Sears in Bishop, California and spoke with his physics class and two chemistry classes on Tuesday morning, March 25. That afternoon, I drove over to Tonopah, Nevada and connected with Clair and Teralyn Blackburn, who had arranged for me to give a presentation to Dr. Tom Whalan’s physical science class at the high school. That evening, I gave a public talk at the school and showed the group how to use their Bahtinov mask to focus the telescope (unfortunately it was too cloudy for stargazing).

Photos from visit to Tonopah

Wednesday morning, I met with Dr. Whalan’s life science class and then headed over to Hawthorne, Nevada. It was spring break for their school district as well, but Katherine Trujillo organized a well-attended star party with over a dozen students and parents. We had clear skies and used the scope to look at Jupiter, the Orion Nebula, and other deep sky objects, and Kathy and I were able to get the Hawthorne camera working successfully with the new RECON netbook.

Thursday, I drove up to Yerington and met up with Todd Hunt, Scott Darrington, and Joanna Kuzia. Over 40 students and teachers joined us in the Yerington High School Library for a public talk and star party that night. The night was partially cloudy, but we were able to show the students Jupiter and Orion and also got some practice on telescope alignment, focusing, and identifying star fields.

Throughout the trip, I was extremely impressed with the questions and curiosity of the students I met and the dedication, teamwork, and enthusiasm of our team leaders!  I’m looking forward to my next visit!!!

We are receiving many reports back from teams throughout the RECON network that Netbooks have been arriving safely!  To support teams in becoming familiar with the Netbooks, we have duplicated the previous post on setting up your Netbook upon arrival and created two additional guides on using your Netbook to capture camera data and checking your camera settings. All of these procedures are best done in the comfort of a warm, lighted room where you can become familiar with the Netbook/camera combination and confirm that your camera settings are correct.  Please do not hesitate to let us know if there are any confusing points on the guides that we can help clarify or correct!  You can also navigate to the above guides by selecting the page labeled  RECON Guides under the Participant Resources menu topic. Coming soon is a guide on using OccultWatcher to sign up for campaign events!

Looking forward to hearing reports on how the Netbooks work with 2001XR254 this coming Sunday night/early Monday morning!

The Tonopah telescope recently returned from maintenance and is back in action!  See newspaper article and photos below for recent RECON activity in Tonopah.

RECON Featured in Tonopah Times-Bonanza Article

Tonopah students participate in training at high school

Tonopah team members working with telescope outside

Photo of Jupiter taken with Tonopah telescope

Cloudy and bright for (976) Benjamina as Tonopah student looks for Antares with sky app

“Sizing Up the Solar System” is a nice article on RECON that appeared today in Student Science: A Resource of the Society for Science & the Public.

The RECON Project has been featured in a 3-minute video on NSF Science Nation!

Special thanks to RECON team members from Carson City, Portola, Quincy, Greenville, Reno, and Hawthorne who helped in various ways with the release of this video!

Also, stay tuned for updates on our next coordinated observation campaign.

Students from RECON Team in Hawthorne, Nevada

It’s been just a year since our 14 community teams were selected to participate in the pilot RECON project to study the outer solar system!  In that short time, each team in the network has been provided with telescope and camera equipment, sent representatives to our four day training workshop held in Carson City Nevada in April, and participated in six coordinated occultation observations of main belt asteroids and Pluto.  In addition, many RECON team members have become active participants in many additional asteroid occultation events coordinated by the International Occultation Timing Association (IOTA.)

Students from RECON Team in Carson City, Nevada

Through these efforts, we have been able to demonstrate the effectiveness of our network of citizen scientists in collecting occultation data and set up infrastructure as we plan to expand the network to include 40 communities stretching from southern Arizona up to northern Washington state!  Once the full network has been deployed, we will be in a position to regularly track occultation events involving Kuiper Belt Objects out beyond Neptune.

Team leads met up in Carson City for RECON training in April 2013

Where will you be this Friday evening at 10:07 Pacific Standard Time? The full RECON network is gearing up to observe an occultation by (176) Iduna!

Visit our campaign event page at the following link: (176) Iduna