First time ever!
I joined a team of AA's hunting down asteroid Roma in its path in the night sky, luckily for us, right in front of Delta Ophiuchi.
We got together in Alentejo by 7:00 pm and there we were given David Dunham's own gear, so we could take it to our own observing spots. Yeah! you got it right! David Dunham himself!
Boy what a thrill, being able to be part of it.
We got debriefed and then we took off to our 4 separate spots. Two teams of two and one team of four were put up and off we went, each one with one of David's gear. For the record: #1 Pedro Ré & Carlos Saraiva; #2 Luís Santo & António Silva and, Filipa & Rui Branco; my cousin Sérgio Bernandino and me; Rui Gonçalves (the project leader was all by himself).
Spots:
Ré's - 38° 37' 1.3152"N, 8° 4' 50.0694"W
Santos' - 38° 30' 17.77"N, 7° 35' 44.35"W
mine - 38°59'19.74"N, 7°12'21.24"W - 20kms west of predicted center line.
My setup:
FS102NSV + DMK21AF + G11
So, time to prep everything and check it twice. The hardest part was making sure David's camera was pointing at the right spot. I guess it was, but maybe, we'll never know...
Well, time went by just like that. When we realized it, it was time. Boy, it was so funny!
We hit the record button at 22h59 to make sure we would capture the occultation on both setups. We didn't see it coming.
After 5 minutes, we were so desperate since he haven't had seen a thing...
Time to call out project leader to feed him with the "bad" news; to make it even worse, he had seen it... man, this would turn out to be a very embarrassing situation for us :-)
We then decided to play the AVI file and... YES! There it was. It had been recorded! 3 seconds of a partial occultation, just after 1 minute we hit the "go" button. But only on my PC did we check; we didn't want to mess around with David's camera. We just hope it is there too.
We had nailed it! :-)
Time to pack up and meet the other guys to check how they did. We had 3 out of 4 occultations. Two full and one partial (ours). Now we need to gather all the data to make it useful.
This was one hell of a very exciting experience and being part of it was just crazy.
We even met David and his wife face to face and all of us were given a "souvenir" to remember this moment: a Nasa/Space Goddard key chain, that I'll treasure forever.
I joined a team of AA's hunting down asteroid Roma in its path in the night sky, luckily for us, right in front of Delta Ophiuchi.
We got together in Alentejo by 7:00 pm and there we were given David Dunham's own gear, so we could take it to our own observing spots. Yeah! you got it right! David Dunham himself!
Boy what a thrill, being able to be part of it.
We got debriefed and then we took off to our 4 separate spots. Two teams of two and one team of four were put up and off we went, each one with one of David's gear. For the record: #1 Pedro Ré & Carlos Saraiva; #2 Luís Santo & António Silva and, Filipa & Rui Branco; my cousin Sérgio Bernandino and me; Rui Gonçalves (the project leader was all by himself).
Spots:
Ré's - 38° 37' 1.3152"N, 8° 4' 50.0694"W
Santos' - 38° 30' 17.77"N, 7° 35' 44.35"W
mine - 38°59'19.74"N, 7°12'21.24"W - 20kms west of predicted center line.
My setup:
FS102NSV + DMK21AF + G11
So, time to prep everything and check it twice. The hardest part was making sure David's camera was pointing at the right spot. I guess it was, but maybe, we'll never know...
Well, time went by just like that. When we realized it, it was time. Boy, it was so funny!
We hit the record button at 22h59 to make sure we would capture the occultation on both setups. We didn't see it coming.
After 5 minutes, we were so desperate since he haven't had seen a thing...
Time to call out project leader to feed him with the "bad" news; to make it even worse, he had seen it... man, this would turn out to be a very embarrassing situation for us :-)
We then decided to play the AVI file and... YES! There it was. It had been recorded! 3 seconds of a partial occultation, just after 1 minute we hit the "go" button. But only on my PC did we check; we didn't want to mess around with David's camera. We just hope it is there too.
We had nailed it! :-)
Time to pack up and meet the other guys to check how they did. We had 3 out of 4 occultations. Two full and one partial (ours). Now we need to gather all the data to make it useful.
This was one hell of a very exciting experience and being part of it was just crazy.
We even met David and his wife face to face and all of us were given a "souvenir" to remember this moment: a Nasa/Space Goddard key chain, that I'll treasure forever.
Oh, BTW, did I mentioned the great dark skies? You got it!
And the original spot I had in mind didn't work because it was chain locked... No prob: Easy enough in Alentejo, just a few kms away we made it quite nice, despite some wind blowing.
And the original spot I had in mind didn't work because it was chain locked... No prob: Easy enough in Alentejo, just a few kms away we made it quite nice, despite some wind blowing.
That's great, Joao! Making science is exciting... isn't it?
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Jose Ribeiro