The International Occultation Timing Association's 43rd Annual Meeting

September 6 -7, 2025 via Zoom online

Richard Nugent, IOTA's Executive Secretary

Special thanks to Dr. Joan Dunham and Dr. Roger Venable for their technical operation of the Zoom meeting

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....Homer F. Daboll Award winner: Ted Blank ................David E. Laird Award recipient: John D. Phelps ..................Dave Gault and Peter Nosworthy, MADAMO award recipients for the ...............................................................................................................................................................................................first ever discovery of an asteroid satellite by occultation - 4337 Arecibo

SATURDAY, September 7th 20:00 UT – Meeting start

Vice President Dr. Roger Venable welcomed everyone to the meeting. Attendees: The meeting started with a total of 47 participants, rose to 57 and this number fluctuated throughout the session.

Business meeting:

Treasurer Dr. Joan Dunham presented IOTA’s financials and membership status. A summary of the year’s income/expense report through August 1, 2025:

Income:

Membership dues & donations.....$77,120
Sales, IOTA Store.........................$10,546
Total Revenue.............................$102,764

Expenses:

Legal and Accounting..............$2,945
Internet........................................$290
Insurance..................................$2,249
JOA..........................................$1,133
Shipping, postage.......................$851
Software & apps.........................$271
PayPal fees.................................$102
Total Expenses.........................$7,841
Net Revenue..........................$94,923

Net Assets:

Bank accounts......................$296,055
IOTA PayPal............................$2,898
PayPal Store.............................$9,127
Investments..........................$782,665
TOTAL..............................$1,090,745

Special Purpose Funds:

MADAMO Award*.................$4,000

*W. J. Merline Award for Discovery of an Asteroid Moon by Occultation (MADAMO). This cash award will be sent to Dave Gault and Peter Nosworthy this week.

IOTA Membership and Subscription: Voting Membership - 125

Donations to IOTA have been made by:

Derald Nye Trust
The family of Walter Morgan, contributing via the Rausch Charitable Fund
Berton Stevens
Anonymous donors via PayPal Giving Fund

Non-cash donations were made by many, spending many hours on observing activities, data analysis, software development and maintenance, IOTA administration, outreach activities, web site maintenance, and more. To everyone who donated to IOTA this past year: THANK YOU! Your support is key to IOTA’s success!

Joan reported the activity with the IOTA store run by Ted Blank. The inventory as of August 25, 2025 is:

17 RunCam Night Eagle 3 cameras with Power/data cables
5 V3 Analog VTI Time Inserters (recent donations)
2 “Open VTI” Analog Time Inserters
10 Complete ASTRID kits ready to assemble minus timing boards (on order)
44 InnoMaker custom cameras for ASTRID

Items currently on order: 10 ASTRID timing boards (for any of the 3 models, Refractor, Prime or Dob) and
10 Night Owl 0.5X Focal Reducers

Sales since August 2024:
30 Complete ASTRID units (mix of Refractor, Prime and Dob)
8 “Open VTI” Analog Time Inserters
2 V3 IOTA VTI Analog Time Inserters

Future plans for the IOTA store include:
- Continue to build, test and ship ASTRID devices
- Continue to build, test and ship analog “Open VTI” if there is demand
- Continue to build, test and ship “Analog Occultation Kits” using RunCam and “Open VTI” if there is
demand
- Build, test and ship “IOTA Flash Timer” when available

Ted will be going to India September 9, 2025 bringing 2 suitcases of equipment. The IOTA-India section has limited access to occultation recording hardware to expand their reach to schools and universities.

Executive Secretary Richard Nugent presented the results of the 2025 election. IOTA’s revised its By-laws in 2022. The new By-laws stated that IOTA Officers will be chosen by Board members. Board members (minimum of 3 and up to 9) are to be elected by the general paid membership.

The election results were unanimous for the following persons:

Elected in 2024 (in a special election):

Board Member: Dr. Aart Olsen
Board Member: Dr. Greg Lyzenga

Elected/re-elected in 2025:

Executive Secretary: Dr. Greg Lysenga
V.P. for Grazing Occultation Services: Dr. Mitsuru Soma
V.P. for Lunar Occultation Services: Walt "Rob" Robinson
V.P. for Planetary Occultation Services: Norm Carlson
Board Member: Dr. Michael Skrutskie

Richard Nugent next presented IOTA’s Homer F. Daboll and David E. Laird awards. The Homer F. DaBoll Award is given to recognize significant contributions to the field of occultation science and to the work of IOTA. This year's recipient of the Homer F. Daboll award is Ted Blank. Since 2010, Ted set up over 190 stations, many of them multiple stations. Ted runs and operates the IOTA Store, assembling kits for the RunCam cameras,the IOTA VTI and Astrid camera. He has participated in several SwRI expeditions for the KBO 2014 MU69 occultation, (discovered by Marc Buie)including Cape Town, Columbia, Argentina and Darwin, Australia. The SwRi expeditions obtained valuable data for these special occultations as well as providing good liaison between them and IOTA.

Upon notification of the award, Ted sent the following email:

I am very humbled and honored to receive this award from my colleagues here in IOTA, and very sorry I cannot be with you today.  Chasing shadows has been a source of great enjoyment for me since meeting David and Joan Dunham at the Cambridge, Mass. IOTA meeting in (I think) 2010.  Occultation recording is an accessible way for an amateur astronomer to make a significant contribution to Solar System science.  While variable star observing is another interesting and useful approach, some of us enjoy the "chase" as well.  As a software guy I have to especially thank Tony George for patiently teaching me how to use LiMovie, R-OTE and PyOTE/PyMOVIE, along with the developers of those packages and all the rest of the wonderful software we depend upon. Clear skies everyone!

-Ted

The David E. Laird award is given to recognize those who, more than 15 years ago, made significant contributions to occultation science and to the work of the IOTA. This year’s David E. Laird award recipient is John Phelps, Jr. from Orland Park, Illinois. John Phelps helped create IOTA in 1975, serving as the first Vice President and Publications Chairman for IOTA for three years. For another five years, until 1983, he served as IOTA’s Secretary-Treasurer, assuming the important role as the point of contact for IOTA. In 1983, he worked with Paul Maley to formally incorporate IOTA in Texas and apply for tax-exempt status as a scientific research organization. John helped set up IOTA’s current structure still in use today.

Upon notification of the award, John sent the following email:

Hi Richard,

Your phone call was sure a bolt from the past! I occasionally still think about my time chasing grazes. PBS recently had a program about an asteroid graze viewed from, I believe, the MiddleEast or Africa. Unfortunately, my computer died shortly after I received your message. I did find a picture of Homer. It is not to recent since it is from the 1970 eclipse. This was my first total eclipse which I had been looking forward to since I discovered the Canon of Solar Eclipses in 1963. I came home on leave from the Navy and my Mother met me in Norfolk. We drove down to North Carolina where we met up with Homer Daboll and his wife Audrey. The next day, we went to a carefully preselected site nearby to watch the eclipse. Homer was participating in an observation program to measure motion of the corona using photos taken at a string sites along the eclipse track thru special film that had a broad range of sensitivity using a surplus aerial camera lens mounted on an wood frame equatorial mount. I tried to photograph, not to well, thru a homebuilt 3-inch reflector while watching visually thru a small elbow telescope. My Mother photographed, on slide film, the activity and changing light levels using a simple Instamatic camera. She got one of Homer standing near his rig and facing the camera near the beginning of the partial phase leading up to totality. If you are interested, I can try to get a print made from the slide and mail it to you. Insidently, last year I completed what I call a Grand Saros, By observing the April 17th eclipse in southern Indiana.

John

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Technical sessions: 16:25 UT

Paul Maley discussed the history and motivation of the W.J. Merline Asteroid Satellite Award (MADAMO) which was introduced in 2013. Paul discussed his history with IOTA starting in 1969 when he began organizing grazes. The catalyst for the MADAMO award was his personal visual observation of a possible satellite of 6 Hebe in 1977 which unfortunately has yet to be confirmed. Paul then talked more of his occultation history and observations worldwide and recently in the Arizona area. Paul has made an astounding 963 positive observations to date of asteroid occultations in his 50+ year career.

Dr. Bill Merline, retired staff scientist from the Southwest Research Institute, discussed the MADAMO award and its creation by Paul Maley. It is a $4,000 cash award to the first amateur (not professional) astronomer that discovers an asteroid satellite by the occultation method. Specifically the award requirements are:

1. Award is open only to an amateur astronomer, i.e., a person who is not and has never been employed as an astronomer in whole or in part by any institution prior to or at the time of the discovery.
2. To be eligible, membership in IOTA or one of its affiliated organizations (such as IOTA/ES or IOTA/ME) is required for at least 2 years prior to reporting a possible asteroid satellite discovery; the award is open to individuals from any nation.
3. Award can be shared by more than one individual on the occasion of multiple individuals providing credible evidence of the same satellite during the same occultation event.
4. Method of detection must be using IOTA methodology such that the resultant video record can be analyzed with IOTA software tools. The term “IOTA methodology” means data collected through single or multi-station observations using GPS time-inserted video, with fixed or mobile optics.
5. Observers using equipment loaned by IOTA or receiving partial funding support through or authorized by IOTA are eligible. Anyone receiving financial support not authorized by IOTA or using equipment provided by other entities is not eligible.
6. Donors are ineligible to receive the award.
7. Does not apply to re-detection/rediscovery of satellites already found and formally identified.

Bill then showed the qualification steps which included reporting the discovery to IAU, plus confirmation and validation by independenat methods (not by occultation) and teams. He then showed the light curves from the 4337 Arecibo occultation on 2021 March 19 made by Dave Gault and Peter Nosworthy from Australia. Just 3 weeks later, observers Drs. Richard Nolthenius and Kirk Bender also detected Arecibo's possible satellite from an occultation in California, again from light curves.

An independent team, led by Paolo Tanga (Université Côte d’Azur), allowed decisive confirmation to be made by using astrometric data from the Gaia mission. Their independent analysis of the asteroid’s duplicity, using a combination of Gaia data and the prior occultation data, allowed a preliminary orbit determination and indicated that the occultation detections were of the same object tracked by Gaia. The results are published by Tanga et al. in Astronomy & Astrophysics 674, A12 (2023). A 3rd independent team (required for the award) validated these results using extensive additional Gaia data and improved the orbit. Paper reference: Liu (IMCCE, Paris Observatory, CNRS) et al., Astronomy & Astrophysics 688, L23 (2024).

The corroborating observations by Noltenius and Bender plus the Gaia data analysis clinched and confirmed the discovery of Arecibo's satellite to Gault and Nosworthy. The impact of the this discovery demostratess that occultations can play a pivitol role in asteroid science.

Bill mentioned his background in building and testing instruments for searching for exoplanets in his Doctoral work and how it eventually led him to look for companions of asteroids. Bill was on one of the imaging teams for the Galileo discovery of the satellite of 243 Ida named Dactyl. He then talked about the history he had using some of the largest telescopes in the world in searching for asteroid satellites including getting 16 half nights on the Hawaii Keck telescopes looking at Pluto's moons.

Full Details of the MADAMO award and it's requirements are found at https://pauldmaley.com/merline/

Dr. Ted Swift presented his experience in May 2025 of discovering that (33956) 2000 NN3 may have a moon. He outlined his mobile observation planning, the observation itself, the discovery of a suspected moon during video analysis, the careful confirmation steps taken, and the CBET publishing process. He also discussed some of the resources available to everyone to learn more about binary asteroids, and the scientific usefulness of observing binary asteroids. From analysis of his light curves, the presumed size of the satellite was estimated to be 2.8km. He showed the sky plane plot of the asteroid and suspected moon. It was estimated that the separation of the objects to be about 14.3km and this was likely a lower limit since only one chord was obtained. The skyplane plot of the system is shown below.

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Jean-Francois Gout (Jeff) discussed using photometrty on asteroids. Photometry can determine the rotation period of asteroids from light curves. Typical rotation periods of asteroids are 2-20 hours and this usually requires observations over several nights. Light curves can also infer the shape of asteroids and to date there are over 10,000 shape models determined. Jeff then showed light curves of binary asteroids and how they differ from single object light curves. Binary asteroids typically show a rapid short secondary drop in brightness due to the typical small size of the satellites. He mentioned the TESS satellite and the 100's of asteroid photometry data sets in its archives. He showed a table of binary asteroid discoveries todate. Photometeic light curves lead the way in such discoveries. Photometry has discovered several binary asteroids in recent years and it can be used as a follow up to help determine the physical parameters of these systems. Parameters such as orbital period, mass, separation and size of the components. He showed the asteroid occultation coming up on Sep 10, 2025 of 33476 Gilanareiss over the USA and that this asteroid's photometery shows a possible satellite.

Dr. Ted Swift commented that knowing the orbital parameters of binary systems and their masses could lead to densities of these asteroids.

Vice President for Planetary Occultation Services Norm Carlson discussed some of the interesting asteroid events of 2024-2025. For 2025 he projected that there will be 1140 North American events observed. This is slightly down from 2024. Norm also discussed the status of the review process of events and how reports and skyplane plots are uploaded to the North American asteroid website.

Norm next talked about the review process for North American asteroid Occultations. Observers send in their log, report file, CSV file and light curves. Then all files are sent out to a reviewer. First the report form is reviewed. Reviewers have seen errors in just about every report filed. Reviewers process the CSV files typically with PyMovie to compare with the observer’s results. The Coordinator then sends the results and light curves to Dave Herald and Dave Gault for final review and eventual uploading to the MPC. Light curves are sent to the ViZier database.

The North American review team is looking at a more automated system, like SODIS. Currently the review team consists of 13 people: Jerry Bardecker, Johnny Barton, Steve Conard, Bob Dunford, Joan Dunham, Kevin Green, Ernie Iverson, Robert Jones, Steve Messner, John Moore "Coordinator Emeritus," George Viscome, Dave Eisfeldt-Tangra support, Tony George- difficult observations. Dave Gault and Dave Herald make the final reviews.

Norm is working on getting a training coordinator to for new reviewers. The review team needs more help. Contact Norm at reports@asteroidoccultation.com. Norm showed sky plane plots of a satellite discovery for 3927 Feliciaplatt on 22 December 2024 by Vince Sempronio. A confirmation just 10 days later on Jan 1 2025 was made by Roger Venable and Kai Getrost. Another satellite discovery by Steve Conard and Greg Lysenga with multiple stations 132221 1998 QT2 was made on 2024 Oct 12.

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....Left: Apparent satellite dicovery of 3927 Feliciaplatt by Vince Sempronio. Right: Confirmation 10 days later by Roger Venable and Kai Getrost

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Another satellite discovery by Steve Conard and Greg Lysenga with multiple stations 132221 1998 QT2 was made on 2024 Oct 12 shown below:

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Hristo Pavlov then talked about recent updates to Occult-Watcher (OW) software and how to use it. Hristo authored OW 15 years ago and the latest version is OW 5.5. OW allows observers to coordinate online with each other for multiple chord events by announcing their planned location to avoid duplication. Hristo's talk was a live demonstration of OW's new features he has implemented. A few of new updates are:

1. The estimated asteroid shadow (size) across the bottom of the screen so observers know where on the ground the asteroid shadow will pass. Asteroid sizes and shapes vary, Hristo plans to list the errors in the size in future OW updates
2. Cloud prediction (% of cloud cover) and weather conditions for locations
3. Announcing your observation after the event has passed. For those doing these after the fact events, you must file and list your report: miss or positive.
4. When choosing an event, OW will list how many previous events for that asteroid have been observed.
5. OW 5.5 is faster

Kazuhisa Miyashita next talked about a data collection system for asteroid occultation reporting currently being used/tested in Japan. For a long time, Japan observers sent in their observations and reports by email which made it difficult for the coordinator as there was no set format for reporting. He showed the Reconstruction of Observation Reports via EMail Text (ROREM) and how it was the 2nd step toward efficiency. Previous reports were done by email and had common mistakes such as precise location. The coordinator had to manually decifer the data and finalize for submission to the world coordinator. He also showed how the data recieved allowed prediction of diffraction patterns on light curves.

Observers create their reports by clicking on a button "Make Report" from the Limovie light curve. This creates a file that includes the D and R times of the event along with the uncertainties and S/N ratio. The observer's name, GPS coordinates, telescope, aperture and time keeping method are entered. See the Report making function below.

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By clicking on "Make Report", ROREM makes a file which includes observer information and D and R times. A report email is generated from this data The observer then selects "Copy for Test Report" and this creates the details of the event ready to email to the coordinator. The new collction sytem ROREM does the following:

1. Provides a system that collects the report emails with minimal effort
2. Transcribes the email report to OBS.XML files automatically
3. Collected files from the observation: camera setting, GPSD log, light curve CSV, light curve graph image,
4. ROREM stores the various data and makes it available to anyone. It makes an HTML file from the database automatically and creates the webpage with the following information: Date/Time of event, Asteroid name/#, observer, result (plot), light curve analysis, star mag, predicted mag drop, telescope used, camera and settings, video format (AVI), Time and GPS location and O-C differences.
5. Makes and sends the regional report to the IOTA Center automatically and this includes: OBS.XML files for each event, .dat light curve files for each observation

The coordinator can combine multiuple observations into a single XML file for reduction using Occult4. The ROREM collection system allows monthly reports and is made automatically.

Kazuhisa mentioned the asteroid Apophis is an additional flyby target of the Japan/German Destiny mission scheduled to be launched in 2028. Some 60 opportunities are availble for occultation events of Apophis with 7 visible from Japan.

Steve Messner talked about the North American low magnitude feed that he maintains (NA Low Mag Feed). Steve started out with an 18" newtonian scope and began using Occult to search for fainter events than were posted on Steve Preston's asteroid page. He thus created the NA feed for these fainter events. Now, with Gaia data, the feed has had much better predicitons. He now has been listing several hundred events/month. Starting in September 2025, he'll change the search criteria for these faint events as follows:

1. List events to m = 14.6, with >1 second duration with >0.6 mag drop
3. As faint as 13.6, >0.7 sec duration with >0.4 mag drop
4. As faint as 12.6, > 0.5 sec duration, > 0.4 mag drop
5. As faint as 11.6, > 0.4 sec duration, > 0.5 mag drop

Starting in November 2025, he'll add events as faint as 11th mag, with > 0.3 sec duration

December 2025: he'll list events down to 15th mag stars.

And all events listed will have a solar elongation > 25 deg. Steve mentioned he can change the filters for events especially avoiding those with short durations and a low rank.

The meeting ended at 23:20 UT.

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Sunday, September 7, 2025, 20:00UT. Technical sessions continued.

Dr. Roger Venable called the meeting to start. Initially there were 26 attendees and this figure rose to 57 quickly and fluctauted throughout the meeting.

Dr. David Dunham presented a talk about the most important and special asteroid occultation events for the the remainder of 2025 and the coming year 2026, particularly special main belt objects, NEAs, Trojans to support the Lucy mission (RECON campaigns), new asteroid moon discoveries and 2026 Lunar grazing events. Many events are on David's webpage:
https://occultations.org/publications/rasc/2025/nam25MBoccs.htm

David mentioned the sucessful 2025 April 18 occultation in Missouri by 319 Leona. This event increased the knowledge of the size and shape of Leona. This will help with the 2023 December 12 Betelguese occultation analysis. Another event was the potentially hazardous 3.5km size asteroid (PHA) 16960 1998 QS52 which occulted the 9.9mag star PPM 203111 on 2025 June 22 across the south USA. This is one of the larger PHA's whose impact would result in wordlwide devastation, however there's no risk in the next 1,000 years. This asteroid 16960 1998 QS52 sky plane profile is shown below:

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More occultations David showed with their paths:

2025 Bright Occultations for the RASC Observer’s Handbook
2025 NEA Occultations
2025 Special Main Belt Asteroidal Occultations
2025 Trojan Occultations including Menoetius on 15 Nov 2025
2026 Lunar Grazing Occultations including Regulus on 2026 Feb 5

David finished with RASC Observer’s Handbook lists of lunar grazing occultations for 2025. He showed path maps and dates/times for the events.

Jean Francis Pillet next talked about several scripts for Sharpcap Pro to help prepare and observe an event. Sharpcap does not have star catalogues, rather they are from SharpSolve and can be shown by the Deep Sky Animation tool. For UCAC4 stars, the script shows the stars on the live view following a plate solve. The SharpCap script uses an external C-compiled software for the star search from the UCAC4 catalog. Jean showed real time views of how this script works.
Script 2 is for QHY174-GPS LED camera calibration. Manual LED calibration can be tedious and has to be repeated after changing settings such as exposure, USB trsaffic, ROI height and cameras color space. Jean showed how this script simplifies the calibrations of these cameras. Scripts can be downloaded from the forum SharpCap: https://forums.sharpcap.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=8492

Script 3 - For occultations and preparation with Occult Watcher Addin. For use with OW, select an event and generate an observation file with the Addin. Jean then demonstrated this procedure and how to use it with GOTO telescopes: Target images can be captured automatically or manually. The script allows setting up an observation hours in advance (assuming a good polar alignment) to start and stop the recording of an occultation. Following the capture, saved information is the start/end time of the observation, exposure time and even weather conditions. Jean showed an example event he observed using the scripts for 468861 2013LU28 observed on 2025 January 30.

Bob Anderson presented a new analysis software for Fresnel difraction fitting for light curves. This new tool is a joint project with Dave Herald currently being developed. He programmed it with Slint. Slint is an open-source, declarative graphical user interface (GUI) toolkit primarily written in Rust. It allows the user to draw the asteroid and light curve to generate a shadow of the sky plane view. The shadow light curve includes: fresnel diffraction (always present), graze angle, star diameter, magnitude drop, camera exposure and asteroid shadow speed. Bob demonstrated how the program works using a point source star and a small asteroid. Bob showed several examples: An observation path in the center of the asteroid shadow showing Fresnel diffraction showing nearly equal vertical height on both sides of the light curve (shown below), a graze situation with the resultant light curve, and the light curve with a finite size star.

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Dave Herald continued the presentation with this new software showing several example light curves from real observations. Using this tool requires some experimentation with the shadow/asteroid size parameters for fitting to light curves. Dave demonstrated the rather tedious process of filling out the form for creating the shadow and matching the light curve. This was from 2 chords for the asteroid 9203 Myrtus and its satellite from an observation on 2025 Feb 22 from Japan. Dave is curently writing documentation for this program.

Dave next talked about double star occultations. This talk was dedicated to Brian and Pauline Loader, both who have very recently passed. Historically, Brian Loader handled double star discoveries from both lunar and asteroid occultations. Double star discoveries from occultations are usually published in the Journal of Double Star Observations (JDSO). There were 3 double star discoveries in 2010. By 2024, there were 23 discoveries, and in 2025 to date 17 discoveries. In 2025 thru July there have been 26 single-component discoveries. In order for double star discoveries to be included in the published Washington Double Star Catalog (WDS), Brian Mason of the USNO needs at least a minimum separation. For inclusion in the WDS, the double star discovery must be published in a journal, preferably the JDSO which is one of several journals monitered by the USNO.

A recent single component observation has been matched to a known double star component. This observation of Tyc2 2453-01773-1 was made by Steve Messner on 2024 Feb 21 with the separation determined as > 3.3 mas. From the separation history of this double star, a question arises: Is the orbit of this system highly eccentric? The separation has varied from 0.522" in 1982 to 0.070" in 1994 to 0.276 in 2008. Such varying separations could mean a nearly edge-on viewed orbit of a binary star (position angles staying constant) or a highly eccentric orbit viewed face on.

Dave showed a light curve of a recent observation currently being investigated which apaears to be a discovery of a triple star.

Dave then presented the best observed world wide asteroid occultations since last year. Dave showed the number of events by asteroid size and chords from the various IOTA regions. Europe and N. America have the most observations approaching 1,000 for each region. The numbers show that 77% of all observations are single chord events. For 2024:

Single chord events: 2032
2-3 chords: 496
4-9 chords: 79 chords
10+ chords: 4 events

The total # of events simce 2000 from all regions = 13,889. The huge increase of observed events recently is largely due to Gaia's accurate positions of asteroids which in turn allows highly accurate updated orbits.

Satellite discoveries are on the rise also. In 2024: 3 discoveries, 2025 (to date): 7 discoveries and pending: 4 discoveries.

Dave showed several selected events from 2024 with multi-chords:

24 Themis: 2024 Feb 28, 14 chords, Japan, shown below
16583 Oersted: 2024 MAr 3, 14 chords, Europe
781 Kartvelia, 2024 MAr 10, 9 chords, Japan
1574 Meyer 2024 Aug 10, 13 chords, Europe
17365 Thymbraeus 2024 Sep 20, 12 chords, Europe, shown below

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Several questions were asked about light curve specifics. A question was asked if observer's names who discover double stars are included in the catalog lists. Dave said they are and showed an example. In the WDS catalog, double stars have a 1-line entry. One column of these entries is a 3-letter designation shown for the discoverer. These are discoverers that have made anywhere from 1 to 1000's of double star discoveries in their lifetimes.

The meeting ended at 00:05 UT on Monday Sep 8

Summaries of all IOTA's annual meetings are at: http://www.poyntsource.com/Richard/IOTA_Annual_Meetings.htm

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 The International Occultation Timing Association is the primary scientific organization that predicts, observes and analyses lunar and asteroid occultations and solar eclipses. IOTA astronomers have organized teams of observers worldwide to travel to observe grazing occultations of stars by the Moon, eclipses of stars by asteroids and solar eclipses since 1962