943 Begonia Occultation Measurement

Well, I figured out a way of doing the analysis. I need to find a proper tutorial, or write one for myself to remember in the future, but some of the tools are misbehaving, possible because they use Python and I think I have some version skew, using Python 3.8 when they were written for 3.7.

In any event, the whole analysis is a group effort, I just get one little piece. But I must say that there is nothing more pleasing that a cool looking graph showing the results of the data analysis.

The uncorrected (meaning raw times from the video frames without corrections for sensor delays) gratifyingly matched what I had manually obtained from eyeballing the data. But the full PyOTE analysis software also estimates timing uncertainties and corrects for sensor characteristics.

This was a magnitude 9.4 star. While I could, last night on the screen, see stars as faint as a nominally magnitude 10.8, I suspect those are actually quite red and the sensor is red (and IR) sensitive, making them appear brighter than their nominal magnitude. The brightness of this star, in ADU as seen above, is about 550. Dropping a full magnitude would take that to about 220 which means it would be sitting in the noise so bad that I’m not sure I could find it to do the measurement. Maybe.

I need a bigger scope.