ASSA/IOTA Planetary Occultation Programme
Notice 1998/2

The Catriona event has come and gone. So far I have had reports from 33 places, all negative. Namibia, our most likely region, was clouded out. No doubt many more reports will stream in. Soon the Planetarium will be inundated with postal responses and after that, Claire Flanagan and I can get together to assess the situation. It has been a most interesting and stimulating exercise so far. Thanks to Tony Voorvelt and Sentech we had a good continuous time signal on 3.215 MHz aimed at Namibia. We received wonderful publicity from radio and press people. Interesting experiments were done with video camera recording.

Catriona has shown again that the Achilles heel of planetary occultation observing is the diffidence shown by inexperienced folk in locating and identifying positively the target star. Any suggestions will be most welcome.

Danie Overbeek (011-453-6918)
danieo@global.co.za