Is it possible to see a grazing occultation from an asteroid?
Well yes ... if you are lucky enough. May be one day we could be able to predict asteroidal occultations so precisely that people will start observing asteroidal grazes and will not be that excited about the "total asteroidal occultations". But until that day it will really require a lot of luck to see a grazing asteroidal occultation. Still this is not impossible and there are several people that have seen such an event. One of them is Oliver Klös when he observed his first occultation ever of (345) Tercidina.
You can open up the [15] Tercidina_Kloes.avi video from Data/Asteroidal Occultations/
What a spectacular event is that! The light curve of the graze is shown below:
Notes from the observers
All fields were captured maunally to avoid double or dropped frames. I observed the occultation visual with a Maksutov f10/1000mm.
Great experience! The event looked like a star pulled back at a rubberband and release very fast. The star didn't disappeared complete. I didn't realized the second, much smaller drop.
Stefan observed with binoculars. He confirmed that there was no clouds, which could have be the cause for this drop of brightness.
I have written a report about this observation for the "VdS-Journal fьr Astronomie" - the journal of the largest amateur astronomy club in Germany.
This report, in German, is available at:
http://journal.fg-vds.de/htm/11_0138.HTM (and next two pages)
It shows an older plot, which shows not all frames. But the impression is the same.
My occultation equipment at the image:
1 Garmin GPS 35 HVS
2 Video Time Inserter Blackbox STVAstro
3 Camera 2006X (it's a PAL version of famous PC-164C)
4 Portable VHS-Recorder by Phillips with integrated LCD screen
Occultation Report
Oliver Kloes
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