Observational Results from the 2007 March 18 Pluto Stellar Occultation

Details Observational Results from the 2007 March 18 Pluto Stellar Occultation Observational Results from the 2007 March 18 Pluto Stellar Occultation

Oct 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007dps....39.6203p&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #39, #62.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.541

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Our consortium observed the 5-minute occultation by Pluto of the star we call P445.3 (2UCAC 25823784, UCAC magnitude 15.3; McDonald and Elliot, 2000, AJ 120, 1599) from sites in the American southwest on 2007 March 17/18 (18 March, UT). Shadow velocity was 6.8 km/s. The 2007 occultation grazed the atmosphere. We were able to use one of the 8.4-m mirrors of the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory, still in its engineering stage, though only with its facility guide camera and not with our Portable Occultation, Eclipse, and Transit System (POETS) CCD/GPS/computer instruments (Souza et al., 2006, PASP 118, 1550). Because of the accurate GPS timing, we were able to align the light curve obtained, which included only the second half of the occultation, with results from other telescopes, including the visible, beamsplit light curve obtained by our group with the 6.5-m MMT (Person et al., 2007, this meeting). We also used, with POETS, the 2.4-m Magdalena Ridge Observatory near Socorro, New Mexico; a partial light curve was obtained despite variable cloudiness throughout the 80 min observation. The location of this telescope was the farthest into the occultation path, and thus led to the deepest incursion into Pluto's atmosphere of the starlight of the major telescopes we used. Light curves were generated by frame-by-frame synthetic-aperture photometry. The large increase in atmospheric pressure we had earlier measured at the 2002 occultation compared with measurements at the first successful Pluto occultation, in 1988, has ceased, as shown by both the 2006 and the current, 2007 measurements.
Acknowledgments: We thank Richard Green for granting Director's Discretionary time for the LBT observations. This work was partially funded by NASA Planetary Astronomy grants NNG05GG75G, NNG04GE48G, NNG04GF25G, and NNH04ZSS001N to Williams College and to MIT.

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