This is a very bright occultation in Scorpius, with a duration of 0.5 seconds and decent altitude for good 1x timing. The target star is very red. IR J-band magnitude 4.0. The path hits too far south along Hwy 1 in Big Sur to make it the favored location, given the road there. Instead, the location best is along Jolon Rd north of Lake San Antonio.
To get the best data, we will want to use 1x and also to reduce gain until the star isn't saturated. By reducing gain, you preserve S/N accuracy while just lowering the counts. This is FAR better than changing gamma, or cutting exposure, or making it far out of focus. Because by cutting exposure, you're hurting S/N with fewer actual photons arriving at their Poisson distributed arrival times. You want instead to count every photon, but scale down the number associated with the count rate. With 1x you can get highest time resolution, and also allow good S/N by cutting gain only.
I've requested a van for Thur May
The weather image looks promising, from ECMWF and Weather.us
click here to see the live cloud image for California
Alt=33, Az=182 due south, just 1 degree left of the top stars in the head of Scorpius.