Thousands of occultations by many more special MB asteroids added for the rest of 2025
These occultations are described and illustrated in this .pdf document,
updated with maps and tables emphasizing the newly-added special objects.
Read that document to learn about the newly-added objects, many of them
from occultation discoveries made since the initial 2025 special MB calculations
were done in late August 2024. Also, Dave Herald has a list of nearly 100
asteroids with confirmed or suspected moons, primarily from past occultations,
which I've gone through to add the more promising objects that were overlooked
before. Also, now we are differentiating between events of lower probability
of a satellite detection, deserving of observations from observatories and
convenient home locations, while another group has higher probability for
finding a moon and in our opinion, warrant expeditions to observe the
occultation from several mobile stations. The first category usually involve
small satellites far from their primaries, and also most objects from the
GAIAMOONS project, where the existence of a satellite is usually far from certain,
and we are not able to prioritize among them. You should watch for emails
from Raphael Lallemand sent to the IOTAoccultations and Planoccult lists;
she often gives advice about how large the satellite may be, and sometimes
an estimate of where it may be relative to the primary object; in those
cases, when the expected moon may be large and relatively close to the
primary, some mobile efforts would be justified. There is more explanation
of this in the .pdf document, which also has information about especially
the occultation discoveries with object sizes and separations given in km
in the sky plane. to help you guage the chances for individual objects.
The .pdf document includes several hot links to external Web pages, but
links to internal files, especially the .xml input files used by the Occult
program, are given below. The first map and table, and some other information
given in the .pdf file, were published on pages 248 and 249 of the
Observers Handbook for 2025, but there are several new maps and tables for
the "most special" objects deserving mobile efforts.
_ _ _ _ _
OCCULTATIONS BY (90) ANTIOPE
This is a binary asteroid with equal large (~90km) components 171 km apart.
Special procedures are needed to show paths of occultations by the separate
components, which is crucial for these events; often only a miss by both
components will occur at the central line of an uncorrected prediction.
The only reasonably good Antiope event for N. America will occur
on 2025 Dec. 7, a 13.2-mag. star visible
from southern Canada and Mainearound 10:40 UT.
_ _ _ _ _
OCCULT INPUT .XML FILES FOR 2025
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.
All of the Occult input files below include all occultations of stars
to magnitude 16.0 with solar elongation greater than 15 degrees.
Earlier File, posted in January:
2025 special Main Belt occultations
The above does NOT include the many other occultation binaries discovered after
the file was generated in August 2024; use instead the new files given below.
New Files for occultations by the now 126 special MB asteroids for late July - Dec. 31, 2025:
rest 2025 all 126 special asteroids worldwide.
North American subset of the above.
The files below are for the 51 "most special" objects deserving, in our opinion,
mobile multi-station efforts. Of course, these can also be observed from fixed
sites, that we encourage, to augment mobile efforts. For finding events worth
mobile efforts, we recommend limiting the events to mag. 14 since few mobile
systems can record occultations of fainter stars with a good S/N ratio.
rest 2025 most special asteroids worldwide.
North American subset of the above
but we recommend using instead the worldwide file since we've found that, with
the geographical (long./lat.) limits, sometimes events near the edges are missed.
______
OCCULTATIONS BY EMIRATES MBR MISSION TARGETS
These are mapped, tabulated, and described for North America on pages 7 and 8
of the .pdf document. But there are some brighter occultations of these objects
in other parts of the world; anyone can find those in their area using the
worldwide Occult file given below. We give immediately below links to Occult
maps showing 4 of the best events that some may want to try:
Aug. 28 8.5-mag. occultation by Rockox, northernmost Chile & Bolivian Altoplano,
the brightest event visible from land during the rest of 2025.
Oct. 9 12.6-mag. occultation by 1999 SG6, north Namibia to Mozambique.
Oct. 28 10.6-mag. occultation by Justitia, northernmost Israel to north Jordan,
the brightest Justiutia event visible from land during the rest of 2025.
A nice event, except the solar elongation is 27 deg.; in the path about
50 km south of Damascus, the star alt. will be +16 deg. and the Sun alt. -12 deg.;
some tests with similarly bright stars should be made under good conditions
to see if 80mm "midi" systems might record the event or if a larger scope
with a red filter (to darken the strongly twilit background) might be needed.
At least, it is a dawn event so the target can be found and tracked in a
darker sky. Justitia is the largest main (and last rendezvous) MBR target.
Dec. 12 11.3-mag. occultation by 1999 SG6, Ecuador to north Guyana,
the brightest 1999 SG6 event visible from land during the rest of 2025.
Occult input files for the 7 UAE MBR mission targets:
Rest 2025 UAE-MBR events to mag. 16 worldwide.
We found 10 events involving them in North America during the rest of 2025;
see the .pdf document for a map and table of them. Click here for the full Occult
table of them. We also generated this Google Earth file of their paths.
See the .pdf document with link at the top for maps and documentation of all of
our special objects.
The updated bright main-belt occultations page contains some explanatory
information not repeated here. As explained there, pages for other categories of
occultations, by major planets and their sateliites, by NEAs, by Trojans, and by
distant objects, will not be posted this year. They are covered in the RASC Handbook,
pages 243-251. The maps and tables of that are given in this presentation (pdf.) file,
and the text there is in this .pdf document.
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MANY MORE EVENTS FROM THE GAIAMOONS/JOHNSTON ARCHIVE FILE BY J-F GOUT
J-F Gout has posted an input file for many more special objects
with links and description in his message but the page he gives there seems
to no longer have Occult input files; before, it only had them for
the last few months of 2024. However, it does have here a link
to a version of the UserMinorPlanetElements.csv file that you can
put in the Occult Resource Files subdirectory; I have renamed it
GaiamoonsAndJohnston2025Feb.csv so that when you download it, it
does not overwrite your UserMinorPlanetElements.csv file, in case
you currently have something in it that you may want to keep. If
that is the case, you should save it with a different name before
copying our file to overwrite your UserMinorPlanetElements.csv
file. Then you can use it with Occult (asteroid predictions module)
to do your own search; it includes all of the Gaiamoons candidates,
and all of the binary asteroids from the Johnston Archives (as of
Feb. 2025), for a total of 843. These will NOT include most of the
occultation-found moons that are in our files given above. Many of
the Gaiamoon and Johnston archive binaries are not very suitable for
mobile efforts, but the Gaiamoons/Johnston file is useful to give
you a larger number of special events to try from your home or
observatory. The elements in it have an osculating epoch of
2025 Feb. 11, which is good enough for all 2025 predictions that
are then updated on OWC with the latest JPL orbits. To generate
an input .xml file to post here, we tried to use the full list,
to generate predictions for stars of mag. 14.0 and greater for
the remainder of 2025, but that exceeded Occlt's 30,000 events
limit. So we changed the mag. limit to 13.5, to get 23,227
occultations with the solar elongation greater than 15 deg.;
1797 of these will occur in or near North America. The brightest
of those will occur on the morning of Aug. 12 in a path from
Nebraska to the Delmarva peninsula, shown this Occult map.
You can use this Google Earth file to zoom in on the path to
see in more detail where it goes, such as over the western and
southern suburbs of Washington, DC. More about it is in the
.pdf document.
The Occult4 input files for these are below:
Rest of 2025 worldwide Gaiamoon and Johnston events with mag. .ge. 13.5
The above is a 17 megabyte file with over 20,000 occultations, so it takes a few minutes to
display, if you try to look at it with Notepad - be patient if you try.
North American subset of the above
______
David and Joan Dunham, 2025 July 28.
e-mail: dunham@starpower.net
cell phone: 301-526-5590