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European Feed for Lunar Occultations of Double Stars

There is a Lunar Occultations Add-in for "OccultWatcher" ready for download to get in OW interesting lunar occultations of double and suspected double stars.

In the last months there were feeds available for Australia and New Zealand (maintained by Brian Loader and hosted by Hristo Pavlov) and North America (by Brad Timerson) for this Add-in.

Now we have a feed for Europe too.

1. What it does?

The feed will remind you of events of double star occultations by the moon. Clicking on the events Dave Herald's OCCULT will pop up and show you more detailed information and a moon map with the location of the star.

Please note that this feed is a reminder tool. You can add the events to your selection "My events" using the follow-up flag but you can't announce your observing plans.

2. What's needed?

Please be aware that this feed NEEDS OCCULT V4 to be installed on the same machine as OW! OW uses OCCULT to make the calculations for your site!

You need the Add-in, which is NOT a tool of the standard OW installation.

You can download the Add-in at:

http://www.hristopavlov.net/OccultWatcher/OccultWatcher_3_3_0_5/OccultWatcher.LunarOccultations.zip

3. Installation

Unzip the zipped Add-In to your OccultWatcher directory.

After starting OccultWatcher you have to configure the new Add-In at the menu: "Add-ins -> Configure Add-ins -> Lunar Occultations for OccultWatcher".

There you have to enter the path of your installation of OCCULT, some parameters (telescope diameter, site altitude and magnitude limit adjustment.)

The mag limit adjustment gives you the possibility to adjust the mag limit to your needs and technical equipment. You may have to adjust it again if you have got some experience.

Finally you have to enter the URL of the feed for Europe:

http://www.iota-es.de/OWFeed/EuroDls.txt

After you have completed the configuration, close OW and restart it.





The feed will appear at the "Configuration -> Prediction Feeds" under the name "Lunar Occultations of Close Double Stars". There you can enable or disable the feed.

After synchronizing OW you'll get the events of the current lunation for your location.

If you have installed this Add-in already, please run OWUpdate.exe at your OW directory to get the latest version of this Add-in.

4. Measurements of Double Stars

If you want to know more about lunar occultations of double stars, have a look at these papers at the "Journal of Double Star Observations"

http://www.jdso.org/

Vol.6 No. 2 - April 2010

"A New Double Star from Lunar Occultations: HIP 87306" (Dave Herald et al.)

Vol. 6 No. 3 - July 2010

"Lunar Occultation Observations of Known Double Stars - Report #1" (Brian Loader et al.)

5. Reporting Lunar Occultations of Double Stars

Double star observations should be reported to TWO places - a double star report to Brian Loader AND a standard occultation report to lunoccult(at)iota-es.de

6. Thanks

I want to thank Jan Manek for his great support. He has set the parameters to cover Europe and created the workflow, which made this feed for Europe possible.

Thanks to Wolfgang Beisker for providing the URL for the feed.

... and of course to Hristo Pavlov for OccultWatcher!!

Good luck with your observations,



Oliver Kloes
IOTA-ES