2023 Occultations by Main Belt Asteroids - Updated September 9
IOTA campaign occultation of 9.1-mag. star by (704) Interamnia, night of Sept. 12/13
These occultations are described and illustrated (in maps and tables) in this .pdf document. It includes several hot links to external Web pages, but links to internal files, the .xml input files used by the Occult program, are given below. 2023 SEPTEMBER 13 OCCULTATION BY INTERAMNIA, S. CALIF. TO NEW YORK This occultation, which only barely didn't make it to appear on our map of the brightest occultations of 2023 in N. America, is now our IOTA campaign event of 2023, as described on the IOTA Campaigns Page. This message sent to IOTA observers via the IOTAoccultations groups.io list server on September 8 gives more links and information about the event. We plan to start the Sept. 11th evening Zoom session about pre- pointing for the occultation at 2:30 or 3:00 UT of Sept. 12, starting with a fairly detailed PowerPoint presentation and followed by a live demonstation, weather-permitting. Finally, another Zoom session will start several minutes before the shadow first reaches N. America's west coast at 10:15 UT of Sept. 13 and will continue until after the shadow reaches New York 3 minutes later, with wrap-up lasting for several min. later, until those attending are ready to call it quits for what is left of the night. If you are interested in joining either of these Zoom sessions, send a brief e-mail to joan_dunham [at] yahoo [dot] com . OCCULT INPUT FILES FOR 2023: When you open these files with your Web browser, you should get a display that looks like this. The larger files may take a couple of minutes to show this appearance, showing a messed-up display before then. Once the proper view appears, right-click anywhere on the display, then "Save as" to a directory on your computer; the best directory is the \Asteroid\ subdirectory in your Occult\ directory. 25 North American main belt events to mag. 9.0, in the Handbook and the .pdf file. 152 North American main belt events to mag. 11.0 453 North American main belt events from Steve Preston Worldwide major planet and satellites events from Dave Herald Worldwide main belt events from Steve Preston - for them, prediction maps and data are available at https://www.asteroidoccultation.com/. But note that Preston updates and adds many events every two weeks, so they are comprehensive only for the next two months. Occult Watcher, described in the .pdf document, is the best way to find out about updated upcoming events near your location. Pages for maps and predictions of occultations by special classes of asteroids can be reached by clicking on the links below: Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) Major Planets and their satellites These other pages below will be posted soon, probably on Jan. 6, but the distant objects will likely not be until February. Selected Special Main-Belt Asteroids Trojan Asteroids (Lucy targets are emphasized) Distant objects (Comet SW1, Centaurs, and TNOs) ______ David and Joan Dunham, 2023 January 4; updated Jan. 6 and Sept. 9 e-mail: dunham@starpower.net cell phone: 301-526-5590