Masthead of ON from 1974 - 1996 calligraphed by Raymond Franklin DaBoll, father of the first editor of ON, Homer F. DaBoll
The Occultation Newsletter Heritage Project
The Occultation Newsletter (ON), precursor of the Journal for Occultation Astronomy (JOA), was published by IOTA from July 1974 to October 2009. Over 120 issues in 14 volumes, more than 2,000 pages, gave predictions for upcoming occultations and reported observations by stations from all over the world. During the pre-internet times, the printed ON was the source for valuable information about occultations and was mailed by postal service. Later issues were distributed as PDFs for download by the worldwide members of IOTA.
All the issues of ON have been freely available as downloadable PDFs for quite a while. Unfortunately, many issues are poor quality scans and are hard to read.
"The Occultation Newsletter Heritage Project" presents for the first time all issues as good quality readable PDFs with bookmarks and the facility for the reader to search the articles for specific terms. Added hyperlinks in articles are checked for their current availability and marked if these are broken.
This project wants to make this valuable resource, compiled by the occultation community all over the world, accessible for beginners and veterans in occultation work and for historians as well.
Many thanks for your support:
● Dietmar Büttner, John W. Briggs and Tom Alderweireldt for providing good quality scans of required copies of Occultation Newsletter.
● Hilary Hargis & Jenny Novacescu (Library of the Space Telescope Science Institute) and Mike Kretlow for printed copies of ON from their archives.
Oliver Klös
IOTA/ES
Stefan Meister from the Swiss SOTAS organization has compiled an index for all ON issues.
You can download the index as a
pdf or as an
xlsx file. In the xlsx file you will find also the index for our JOA issues, as can be found on our
JOA issues page.