This is the regular monthly meeting of the Delaware Valley Amateur Astronomers, held in the Radnorshire Room at the Radnor Community Building. The meeting is open to DVAA members and the public. We start with a short business meeting focusing on announcements and upcoming events, followed by an Observing Report and a Featured Presentation. We gather beginning at 7pm; the program and the livestream begin at 7:30pm.
The meeting will be livestreamed on our YouTube channel beginning at 7:30pm.
DVAA Student award presentation: Safilin Salma, "Effects of Bandpass Filter Range on the Visibility and Duration of the GW150914 Gravitational Wave Signal."
Featured Presentation: Steve Conard
Asteroid Occultation Timing--New and Improved (Alternative Title: "This Ain't Your Parents' Occultation Timing" ??)
Abstract: In the past 5 years, the measurement of astrometry, size, and shape of asteroids using occultation timing has undergone radical change. Improvements to event predictability now allow us to perform these measurements on asteroids smaller than a kilometer in size. The IOTA-developed Astrid data collection system has simplified set-up for unattended stations--making it much easier for a single person to collect multiple chords. Python based data analysis tools have become much more sophisticated, both in extracting data and analyzing the results.
The resulting sea change has had both positive and negative effects. In North America, we are generating an order of magnitude more data than just a decade ago. Our volunteer group of coordinators and analysts have been swamped by data, and as a result fell far behind on processing. New tools now are allowing us to begin to catch up. The discoveries of unusual asteroid shapes and binary asteroids have dramatically increased, due to the combination of the increase in asteroids measured and the trend toward measuring smaller asteroids that seem to have a larger fraction of these features.
Steve Conard, who has collected occultation timing date for nearly 20 years, will begin the talk with the basics of these citizen-science measurements. He'll then go through the major changes to predictions, data collection, and processing that have occurred recently. One of Steve's portable data collection stations will be on display. If clear, after the meeting there will be a brief demonstration of the data collection system in the parking lot for those who are interested.