This is a very difficult event. The drop in magnitude is only 0.08 magnitude. The target star is only 14.7 magnitude so think of the integration needed to get an occultation to vanish starting out at 14.7 magnitude. You'll need at least a 1s integration. But then to avoid saturation which will ruin the detection, you'll have to lower the gain. Still keep the star bright, though, or the noise will again ruin detection. You want the target to be as bright as possible w/o saturation. Karl - keep the "contrast" low'ish. Don't try to improve visibility by raising contrast, you'll risk saturation even of "faint" pixels, in my experience.
Kleopatra has 2 moons, but the drop is so shallow that I don't think they'll be detectable for us.
Alt=33, Az=222 in Ophiuchus, right above his "hand" holding the left half of Serpens. That's about 1/3 of the way up Ophiuchus from the bottom set of bright stars
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Kirk and I got this one from home or near home in my case. Karl didn't try it, a schedule conflict.
I got a recording from across from SC High School at Walnut. Clear skies, at 32x and then 64x before the event was to start.
PyOTE found a 13.8804s event in my recording for Kleopatra on Sep 9, 64x from home. The duration is longer than predicted max 10.85s, but the error bars are wide and the central time and mag drop are roughly as predicted. I followed your suggestion to use 1 sec integration with the gain turned down. I found a mask size of 4.3 in PyOTE gave the best NIE sigma in PyOTE. The curve is noisy, but the NIE sigma distance is 2.2. For some reason, the tracking stars had a slight downward slope but the target was relatively flat. Normalizing against a tracking star in PYOTE altered the target curve too much and caused early spurious dips in the target curve so I did not do normalization for the timings.
NIE sigma distance = 2.2
magDrop report: percentDrop: 5.8 magDrop: 0.065 +/- 0.032 (0.95 ci)
DNR: 1.31
D time: [04:53:22.1617]
D: 0.6800 containment intervals: {+/- 1.9529} seconds
D: 0.9500 containment intervals: {+/- 7.2673} seconds
D: 0.9973 containment intervals: {+/- 18.0455} seconds
R time: [04:53:36.0421]
R: 0.6800 containment intervals: {+/- 1.9529} seconds
R: 0.9500 containment intervals: {+/- 7.2673} seconds
R: 0.9973 containment intervals: {+/- 18.0455} seconds
Duration (R - D): 13.8804 seconds
Duration: 0.6800 containment intervals: {+/- 3.4747} seconds
Duration: 0.9500 containment intervals: {+/- 10.2413} seconds
Duration: 0.9973 containment intervals: {+/- 22.5244} seconds
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