OBSERVATION OF AN OCCULTATION OF THE UCAC4 488-082551 STAR BY ASTEROID (76228) 2000 EH 75 ON 31 MAY 2022

Abstract

Observations of an occultation of the UCAC4 488-082551 star by asteroid (76228) 2000 EH 75 were carried out on 31 May 2022 at Kryzhanivka observation station of Odesa I. I. Mechnykov National University (the observatory code A85). A set of instruments, which included a Schmidt telescope (the primary mirror diameter D = 271.25 mm; the corrector plate diameter D k = 223.9 mm; the focal length F = 440 mm), a GPS receiver and Videoscan-415-2001 CCD camera, was used to perform observations. The observing conditions were as follows: clear sky, the star’s altitude 49 0 south, the Moon was below the local horizon. The target star from the UCAC4 catalogue (Zacharias et al. 2013) has the following photometric parameters: m B = 14.008; m V = 12.720; m r = 12.284; m i = 11.813. The diameter of the star has not been determined. Asteroid (76228) is a Main Belt asteroid with an orbital period of 4.17178 years. It has an absolute magnitude of 14.93, the visible geometric albedo of 0.123±0.013 and diameter of 5.00±0.23 km (Masiero et al. 2011). The time of occultation predicted using ephemerides was 23:52:44±4 sec. The maximum duration of the occultation was 0.4 sec, provided that the observing site was located at the centre of the occultation track (strip). A drop in the star’s brightness observed during occultation was about 8 m . The occultation event was recorded as a sequence of GIF images with the exposure time of 0.5 sec per frame. The system clock of the computer used for the occultation recording was controlled with a GPS receiver in a fashion similar to that described in the paper by Karbovsky et al. (2017). The data processing yielded an estimate of the occultation duration of 0.46±0.04 sec. The uncertainty of the occultation start time within exposure results in the total estimate of accuracy in timing the maximum phase of occultation 23:52:44.06±0.10 sec. The chord length across the asteroid estimated by timing the occultation is L = 9.2±0.8. This chord length is close to the estimates of the asteroid diameter reported in the paper by Masiero et al. (2011).