On Apr 9, 1999, Jim Kern and I woke up at 2:15 AM (ugh) and headed to the RIT Observatory. We wanted to catch the asteroid 192 Nausikaa as it passed over the tenth-magnitude star TYC 6752 00355.
We discovered a prediction of the event at the home page of the International Occultation and Timing Association. Rochester lay right in the center of the predicted shadow path, which was only a few hundred miles wide.
The skies were partly cloudy, so we weren't expecting much. The event took place just twenty degrees above the southern horizon, so we couldn't use the 16" telescope (its roll-off roof doesn't provide a low enough horizon to the south). That turned out to be a blessing, because the much larger field of view of the Meade 10" with f/6.3 focal reducer helped a great deal in identifying the field.
We used the intensified video camera, coupled to the back of the Meade 10". It gave a field of view of about 15x10 arcminutes, and, based on the stars we could see, went down to about mag 12 at a reasonable gain setting. We had a lot of trouble finding the field: the finder scope was not aligned with the main telescope, and it took us about 20 minutes to figure out where we were.
When we finally did start taping the proper field, it was about 3:12 AM EDT. The occultation was predicted to occur sometime between 3:10 and 3:20 EDT. We watched carefully for at least 10 minutes, but saw no dimming of the star. There were several occasions when clouds passed in front of the area, making all the stars in the field grow faint or disappear; but the longest such interruption was only 20 seconds or so.
So, a negative result. Rats. But we did learn that we need