Asteroid Occultation - Thursday Night (4/9)

[Zach Schierl]

Hi everyone, 

I will be observing an asteroid occultation as part of the RECON project tomorrow night (Thu, 4/9) at 10:54 pm PDT. The target is the Jupiter Trojan (19725) 99WT4. I was recently given some new equipment for this work, so I'll be setting up starting around 10:00 pm to make sure everything is working properly.

The weather forecast looks promising at the moment. I'll be observing from home. If you are interested in joining, let me know and I will send you directions.

If you are new to the group and not familiar with the project, RECON is a collaborative observing network currently funded by NASAs Lucy mission which has a robotic spacecraft en route to several Jupiter trojan asteroids. An occultation occurs when one of these asteroids briefly passes between us and a distant star. By carefully measuring the duration of the occultation from many locations, we can learn more about the size, shape, and location of these asteroids. 

-Zach

[Dawson]

Zach,  this is really cool.I thought the asteroid project was over.  Is this a new different asteroid? 

And yes,  I'd be interested in following what you are doing tonight. It's a broad sky out there in what direction are you looking? My largest score is only 8". Not so sure I could see an asteroid that wasn't large. 

Dawson. 

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[Sam Knox]

How was the imaging last night? Did you catch the occultation?

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[Larry Kirkpatrick]

Sequential image review will tell the story. Either it happened faster than we could witness, or a technical/equipment error occurred. Zach and Josh were kind enough to rotate the C11 around a show us a stacked image of M101 afterwards 🙂

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From: yakima-valley-...@googlegroups.com <yakima-valley-...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Sam Knox <max...@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, April 10, 2026 12:50 PM
To: Dawson <dawson....@gmail.com>
Cc: Zach Schierl <zschierlp...@gmail.com>; Yakima Valley Astronomy Club <yakima-valley-...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [YVAC] Asteroid Occultation - Thursday Night (4/9)

 

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