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Charon occults UCAC2 2625 7135
July 11th 2005, 3h 39min
UTC
As has been announced first by
David Herald (IOTA) Charon, the big satellite of Pluto will occult the
15th magnitude star UCAC2 2625 7135 on July 11th, 2005. The event will
be visible in the South America, specially from Chile, Argentine,
Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. Possible other countries are, depending
on the final track, Bolivia and Peru.
The event carries the number C313.2 on the MIT list, which has been updated on September 2004 with that event.
This is the most favorable event since a lot of years.
The scientific goals of the observation are:
We are looking for cooperation partners in southern america, who can support such an expedition with logistics, transportation and instrumentation. Because of the faintness of the star and the PLuto system, it is to be expected, that the minimum telescope size for observation will be larger than 30cm. Because of the very unfavorable position of the occulted star in the sky right now, there are no precise photometric measurements with IOC cameras right now. As soon as photometry is available, it will be presented here.
In the year of the successful Huygens landing, this will be the most important astronomical event in 2005! Charon would be the smallest solar system body containing an atmosphere! Keep this in mind.
The following figure from Bruno Sicardys Webpage shows the latest update (April 2005) of the occultation track.
The track will be updated as soon as new predictions become available. Stay tuned!
Preparations of IOTA Occultation Cameras (IOC)
For this occultation some of the stations will be equipped with IOTA Occultation Cameras. Some of the preparations you can see in this image:
Weather informations of the past can be found at different websites. You can see an overview of the global cloud coverage at the land cloud atlas at http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~ignatius/
Other important site is http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climateresearch.html#dandp
where you can find the "Climates of the World" giving a lot of informations at
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/documentlibrary/pdf/climatesoftheworld.pdf
A commercial german website with reasonable good informations can be found at
http://www.wetter.com/v2/?SID=&LANG=DE&LOC=0226&LOCFROM=0201
You can select the country and the city. Par Example, for Bolivia, you find the cities of Cobija, Cochabamba, La Paz, Puerto Suarez (Prov. Santa Cruz), Santa Cruz, Sucre and Trinidad (Prov. Beni).
Then you get climatable with data such as max and min temperatures, rel. humidity,
rainfall, number of days with rain and sunshine hours per day.
This may help to find out your weather for this important event. For commercial reasons, I will not copy directly the data to this website, you should look by yourself.
Finding Charts for Pluto in the next months
Here are finding charts for observation of Pluto in the following months up a few days past the event.
They have been generated using the UCAC2 catalogue and the program XEPHEM.
They show the orbit of Pluto with tickmarcks every two days (except for the July map, there its every day) and labels every 10 days. Each label and tickmark has been set for 0h UTC. In the following you find low resolution star maps. Postscript files you can download from the server as well.
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
Here you can download the files in full resolution as postscript file:
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
Here you see finding chart with a smaller field of view as well as with magnitudes from the UCAC2
11th of July, 2005 the star in the center is the star to be occulted!
As a postscript file you can find the chart here
Besides on this IOTA-ES page you find more informations at:
http://calys.obspm.fr/~sicardy/charon/charon.html
Wolfgang Beisker
International Occultation Timing Association (IOTA-ES)
Research and Development
CONTACT: info@iota-es.de
The event carries the number C313.2 on the MIT list, which has been updated on September 2004 with that event.
This is the most favorable event since a lot of years.
The scientific goals of the observation are:
- The possible detection of an atmosphere around Charon or of an upper limit
- The precise determination of Charon's diameter
- The precise determination of Charon's mean density
We are looking for cooperation partners in southern america, who can support such an expedition with logistics, transportation and instrumentation. Because of the faintness of the star and the PLuto system, it is to be expected, that the minimum telescope size for observation will be larger than 30cm. Because of the very unfavorable position of the occulted star in the sky right now, there are no precise photometric measurements with IOC cameras right now. As soon as photometry is available, it will be presented here.
In the year of the successful Huygens landing, this will be the most important astronomical event in 2005! Charon would be the smallest solar system body containing an atmosphere! Keep this in mind.
The following figure from Bruno Sicardys Webpage shows the latest update (April 2005) of the occultation track.
The track will be updated as soon as new predictions become available. Stay tuned!
Preparations of IOTA Occultation Cameras (IOC)
For this occultation some of the stations will be equipped with IOTA Occultation Cameras. Some of the preparations you can see in this image:
Weather informations of the past can be found at different websites. You can see an overview of the global cloud coverage at the land cloud atlas at http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~ignatius/
Other important site is http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climateresearch.html#dandp
where you can find the "Climates of the World" giving a lot of informations at
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/documentlibrary/pdf/climatesoftheworld.pdf
A commercial german website with reasonable good informations can be found at
http://www.wetter.com/v2/?SID=&LANG=DE&LOC=0226&LOCFROM=0201
You can select the country and the city. Par Example, for Bolivia, you find the cities of Cobija, Cochabamba, La Paz, Puerto Suarez (Prov. Santa Cruz), Santa Cruz, Sucre and Trinidad (Prov. Beni).
Then you get climatable with data such as max and min temperatures, rel. humidity,
rainfall, number of days with rain and sunshine hours per day.
This may help to find out your weather for this important event. For commercial reasons, I will not copy directly the data to this website, you should look by yourself.
Finding Charts for Pluto in the next months
Here are finding charts for observation of Pluto in the following months up a few days past the event.
They have been generated using the UCAC2 catalogue and the program XEPHEM.
They show the orbit of Pluto with tickmarcks every two days (except for the July map, there its every day) and labels every 10 days. Each label and tickmark has been set for 0h UTC. In the following you find low resolution star maps. Postscript files you can download from the server as well.
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
Here you can download the files in full resolution as postscript file:
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
Here you see finding chart with a smaller field of view as well as with magnitudes from the UCAC2
11th of July, 2005 the star in the center is the star to be occulted!
As a postscript file you can find the chart here
Besides on this IOTA-ES page you find more informations at:
http://calys.obspm.fr/~sicardy/charon/charon.html
Wolfgang Beisker
International Occultation Timing Association (IOTA-ES)
Research and Development
CONTACT: info@iota-es.de