Report of the Observation Team at Aigua, Uruguay
The team used a self-made telescope by Alberto Ceretta and a modified Philips comercial webcam.
This is the report by Alberto in Spanish. An English translation follows after his report. (Thanks to Diana Seiler, who made the translation for me. Oliver)
Hola a todos.
Como algunos ya están enterados el Viernes fuimos con Santiago Roland rumbo a Aigua a intentar la observación del transito de Varuna por delante de la estrella UCAC2 40846256. Cuando Santiago me comento, le dije que estaba loco porque la ocultación se daría a unos 7 grados de altura en el horizonte NNE lo que para mi hacia imposible observar una estrella como esta de magnitud R 14.5. A pesar de que intente desalentarlo no pude y el Viernes a la tarde marchamos rumbo a la zona de Aigua en el limite departamental Lavalleja - Maldonado.
El lugar de destino para la observación fue la casa de la familia García-Gaudino donde Bernardo Pombo, docente de secundaria y aficionado a la astronomía, nos esperaba para colaborar con la observación. Hubiera sido imposible sin la ayuda de él y su familia.
Hicimos una primer noche de pruebas y puesta en estación
Las primeras pruebas mostraron que en el campo podíamos detectar estrellas de magnitud 13 y 14 con 5 segundos de exposición.
Me quede sorprendido de la magnitud límite a la que llegamos en esa altura, si bien no detectábamos la estrella, por momentos parecía verse, cosa que para mi fue mucha mas de lo que esperaba.
Si bien el resultado en principio fue que no pudimos detectar la estrella a ocultar, el aprendizaje fue mucho y no estuvimos tan lejos de lograrlo.
Un saludo a todos, Alberto
(Translation English)
Hi all,
Some of you already know: we moved at Friday to Aigua with Santiago Rolan. We wanted to try to the observation of the occultation by Varuna of the star UCAC2 40846256. As Santiago told me about his plans, I said this would be crazy, because the star would be 7 deg above the horizon at NNE. I was sure that an observation of a star with R 14.5 mag would not be possible. Anyway we drove to Aigua at the border of the zone Lavalleja – Maldonado at Friday afternoon.
Our site fort he observation was the house of fanmiliy García Gaudino, where we were awaited by Bernardo Pombo, teacher and astronomy fan. He wanted to help us with the observation. An observation would have not be possible without him and his family.
We set up the station (30 cm) and made a rehearsal in the first night and kept the station nearly completed for the night of Saturday/Sunday.
With an exposure of 5 sec. we could record stars as faint as 13 to 14 mag on this country side. Our goal was to measure the duration of the occultation (40 sec), so we wanted to avoid exposure times of more than 5 sec to improve the time resolution of the measurement. So we tried it with 5 sec.
I was surprised about the limiting magnitude we could get on this altitude but we could not detect the target star. Sometimes we could see the star, that was more I had expected before.
To summarize: We could not record the occultation. We learned a lot and we were very close to our goal.
Greetings to all,
Alberto
