A digital video system for observing and recording occultations

TL;DR

This paper presents the design, implementation, and testing of the ADVS, a low-cost digital video system optimized for observing stellar occultations, enabling detailed study of distant solar system objects with modest telescopes.

Contribution

The paper introduces the ADVS, a novel digital video system tailored for occultation observations, demonstrating its effectiveness through three real-world test cases.

Findings

Successfully recorded occultations of trans-Neptunian object Ixion, Deimos, and asteroid Havnia.

The system achieved high temporal resolution and low noise in recordings.

Compared favorably with other existing occultation recording systems.

Abstract

Stellar occultations by asteroids and outer solar system bodies can offer ground based observers with modest telescopes and camera equipment the opportunity to probe the shape, size, atmosphere and attendant moons or rings of these distant objects. The essential requirements of the camera and recording equipment are: good quantum efficiency and low noise, minimal dead time between images, good horological faithfulness of the image time stamps, robustness of the recording to unexpected failure, and low cost. We describe the Astronomical Digital Video occultation observing and recording System (ADVS) which attempts to fulfil these requirements and compare the system with other reported camera and recorder systems. Five systems have been built, deployed and tested over the past three years, and we report on three representative occultation observations: one being a 9 +/-1.5 second occultation of the trans-Neptunian object 28978 Ixion (mv=15.2) at 3 seconds per frame, one being a 1.51 +/-0.017 second occultation of Deimos, the 12~km diameter satellite of Mars, at 30 frames per second, and one being a 11.04 +/-0.4 second occultation, recorded at 7.5 frames per second, of the main belt asteroid, 361 Havnia, representing a low magnitude drop (Dmv = 0.4) occultation.