2024 Occultations by Distant Solar System Objects - Updated 2024 June 5
These occultations are described and illustrated in this .pdf document. It includes Occult or RECON maps for several events with useful links to where more information about them can be found; please read it. The links in it are to external Web pages, but links to internal files, espe- cially the .xml input files used by the Occult program, are given below. This update is largely due to a mistake I made in the first version of the .pdf document where I said that (54598) Bienor HAS a ring, but that's not correct, the Centaur only MIGHT have a ring, according to a 2017 open access MNRAS publication. For that reason, it would be valuable to observe future occultations by Bienor with telescopes large enough to detect a ring occultation. K Ly noted my mistake in a personal message a few days ago. _ _ _ _ _ OCCULTATION ON JUNE 2 BY (523700) 2014 GM54 This Trans-Neptunian Object (TNO) occulted a 13.2-mag. star in Sagitta, as described in this .pdf document. The Occult Watcher (OW) cloud prediction showed a path crossing the USA from Maryland to Washington State, but with 1-sigma error bars that included the whole "lower 48" USA except the southern -most part of Texas, and much of Canada and some of northern Mexico. A separate prediction by RECON had a path much farther north with similar errors. The OW cloud results showed a few negative observations and several "clouded out or could not observer" with no positives. The main distant occs .pdf stressed that observers should look out for such non-Lucky-Star events in their OW and if they find one, to notify IOTAoccultations or Planoccult, if the event has not already been mentioned earlier on those listservers. _ _ _ _ _ OCCULT WATCHER (OW) AND OW CLOUD The best (most up-to-date) information for these events, but only for the next 60 days, is usually obtained with Occult Watcher and its associated OW Cloud that has the prediction information for many thousands of current and near-future occultations. The details of an individual event can be found on this OW cloud page and specify the asteroid's number and the date. Don't try to type the date; you need to click on the calendar sysmbol to specify the date. There may be more than one occultation of a given object on a given date, so look at the UT time and the star magnitude or designa- tion to get the right event, but for the distant objects, there are almost always only one. Once you select and click on the event, you get to the first OW page, which has links to zoomable photographic Aladin finder charts at the top, an Occult map at the bottom, and a list of the different predic- tions for the event. Usually, the first of those, the "default" prediction, is the one to click on, but for distant objects, the Lucky Star prediction is usually the best one. When you click on the prediction line, you get a zoomable Google map for the event and details of the occultation, the occulted star, and the occultating object on the right. Clicking anywhere on the map gives you the occultation U.T. and circumstances at that place, and then at the bottom, you can fill out some information and submit the location for your observation, to alert others and allow coordination so that others don't duplicate your line. If you are mobile, try to avoid the lines, shown on the map, that have already been declared by others. _ _ _ _ _ INFORMATION FOR ACM 2023 CONFERENCE (AND OTHERS) Much useful information is also given on a special page I set up for the Asteroids, Comets, and Meteors (ACM) conference held in Flagstaff, AZ last month. It includes a link to my presentation given there about NEA and other special occultations, to a much longer version of that presentation given on July 9 by Zoom to the ChesMont Astronomical Society, to several abstracts and ePosters relating to occultations from the ACM Web site, and to much general occultation information suitable for those interested in getting started with observing occultations. _ _ _ _ _ OCCULT INPUT .XML FILES FOR 2024 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. For the 5 distant Solar System objects events mapped and tabulated in the main .pdf document Worldwide distant objects events to mag. 16, 91 occultations for 2024. The file was obtained from a link at the bottom of Steve Preston's Web site for 2024, where it is given as a .zip file, but I have unzipped it for posting here. Many of these are also predicted by the Lucky Star Project. _ _ _ _ _ Visit IOTA's main page for occultations by main-belt asteroids to learn sbout the many occultations by other small bodies in the Solar System. It has links to other pages, including occultations by near-Earth asteroids, by special main belt asteroids, and by Trojan asteroids. ______ David and Joan Dunham, 2024 May 25; updated June 5 e-mail: dunham@starpower.net cell phone: 301-526-5590