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A Magyar Csillagászati Egyesület elektronikus hírlevele 1999.07.07.
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VII. évfolyam, 823. szám
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OCCULT v4.20
A sokak által ismert és szeretett programcsomagnak napvilágott látott az
újabb verziója. Alább az angol dokumentációt ismertetjük. De elõtte még
gyrosan megjegyezzük: hogy ne kelljen az ismertett fájlokat a külföldi
szerverrõl letölteniük az érdeklõdõknek, tükröztük azokat az alábbi helyen:
ftp://ftp.mcse.hu/pub/astro/occult
Sok sikert a letöltéshez és az occu-láshoz!
Tepi
===========================================================================
David Herald, David W. Dunham, and Walt "Rob" Robinson
OCCULT version 4.20 has many more capabilities than version 3.XX. It can
compute virtually all predictions and reductions that an IOTA member
would want, and it can run on most PC-compatible machines. The main menus
of the program allow selection of the following major options:
Compute lunar total occultation predictions
Compute lunar grazing occultation predictions
Record occultation observations in ILOC´s format
Reduce total occultation observations
Generate reduction profiles of observed grazes
Reduce asteroidal occultation observations
Predict lunar and solar eclipses
Predict occultations and appulses by asteroids
Generate an ephemeris of solar system objects
Walt Robinson, 515 W Kump, Bonner Springs KS, 66012 (robinson@sky.net)
distributes OCCULT 4.0x for IOTA. The software and files are on a CDROM
and available for $2 (cost of the CD) plus postage to your area. Most
generally for anyone in the continental USA, this amounts to around $5.
For those outside the continental USA, cost will determine postage rates to
your area. Email Walt Robinson at webmaster@lunar-occultations.com for rates
before ordering. Make checks payable to Walt Robinson in US funds. For those
with FTP capabilites, the software can be downloaded freely from
ftp://lunar-occultations.com
The program can calculate lunar occultation data for any year in the
past or future for which a delta-T value is supplied. The deltat.dat
file contains values for 1860 through 2004, but it can be edited to add
values for other years; in the near future, delta-T is expected to increase
at a rate of about a second per year.
For those who have the CDROM HST Guide Star catalog, the program has the
capability for creating a special star catalog in a selected part of the
sky for generating predictions. This is valuable for total lunar eclipses,
lunar passages across open clusters and dense parts of the Milky Way, and
for identifying unpredicted stars. In the documentation, Herald explains
how to take care of the problem of missing events near 0h U.T.: Compute
predictions for both the day preceding 0h as well as the date including it,
and all events near 0h will appear in the list for one day or the other. He
also explains that the standard DOS program graphics.com must be executed
before entering OCCULT to print plots of the graphics (profiles, maps, etc.);
those with HP Laserjet III and IV printers should type "graphics laserjetii"
or add a line with this in the autoexec.bat file. David Herald now has an
e-mail address (heraldd@canberra.DIALix.oz.au) and is willing to help
users solve problems that they might encounter with OCCULT.
The asteroidal occultation prediction capability can be used to produce
world-view maps, like those produced by Goffin and Soma, and 2 deg.
PPM-based star charts. Some approximations are made for efficiency, and one
test showed a difference of 08 in the path from Goffin´s prediction. This is
larger than the typical 04 error of AsteroidPRO or Goffin´s predictions, but
is sufficient to tell which events might be worth watching for from a given
location, and which would warrant astrometric updates.
The grazing occultation prediction option is now quite powerful,
allowing one to generate predictions for all XZ events within a
specified travel radius virtually like the IOTA Grazereg predictions.
But observers are warned that the OCCULT graze profiles are very similar
to the Grazereg profiles, and that neither include the extensive empirical
corrections and previous observed-graze data that are in the ACLPPP profiles
that can only be produced by the IOTA graze computors. The same corrections
described for the Grazereg profiles discussed on the last pages of the
hemispheric grazing occultation supplements for late 1995 can also be
applied to the OCCULT profiles to obtain a better estimate of the graze
zone and decrease the chances for seeing a miss, or only a single long
occultation. Both OCCULT and Grazereg need the documentation of the ACLPPP
empirical data that Dunham has not had time to prepare. OCCULT can produce
regional and local maps of graze limits, using IOTA´s database of coastlines
and political boundaries that Herald rearranged in a much more compact form.
The user can add many large and medium-sized cities, and local small towns,
to the cities database for plotting on the maps.
The full installation of Occult 4.20 is distributed freely. We ask that
you contact David Dunham at dunham@erols.com or Walt Robinson at
webmaster@lunar-occultations.com if you download, so we can keep track
of usage.
-Read/print the documentation file - be sure to get ALL files
-Once you verify that the installation is OK, you may delete the .exe
setup files
-Also, for users of earlier occult versions, you may want to copy over
files you may have modified. These are sites.dat, defaults.dat and
cities.dat
Addendum from David Herald:
Installing/Updating OCCULT
OCCULT is a software package that predicts Lunar Occultations; prepares
reports of Lunar Occultation observations, and reduces the observations;
predicts solar & lunar eclipses, and transits, and provides general planetary
predictions. It also computes predictions of occultations of stars by
asteroids, and by the planets.
The OCCULT software is distributed as five self-extracting ZIP files.
----------------------------------------------------
To install OCCULT for the first time, you need to download:
INSTALL.EXE
OCCULT1.EXE
OCCULT2.EXE
OCCULT3.EXE
OCCULT4.EXE
To compute predictions of occultations by asteroids, you also need to
download OCCULT5.EXE You do not need this file if you do not want to
compute occultations by asteriods
You can download these files to any directory. When you have downloaded,
run INSTALL.EXE to install OCCULT on the desired drive. OCCULT is
installed in a root directory called \OCCULT. Full installation requires
about 14Mb drive space; If OCCULT5 is not installed, drive space requirement
is around 7.4MB.
The command to run the program is \OCCULT\OCCULT
-----------------------------------------------------
To update an existing version of OCCULT, you need to download:
INSTALL.EXE
OCCULT2.EXE
OCCULT3.EXE
You do not need OCCULT4.EXE. It contains the file WATTS.DAT, which is
not subject to change. You do not need OCCULT5.EXE. It contains the
files for the PPM catalogue for use with predicting occultations by
asteroids. THese files are not subject to change.
OCCULT1.EXE contains the files:
Defaults.DAT, DeltaT.DAT, Multisit.DAT, Sites.DAT, StarCat.DAT,
Cities.BIG, Cities.Med, and Cities.SML.
These files will usually have been edited by the user to customize for
their location. Updating OCCULT with the OCCULT.EXE file will overwite
these files, with a
loss of any edited information.
***********************************
IMPORTANT NOTE:
For users updating from a version of OCCULT before 4.20, please read the
readme.dat file located in the \OCCULT directory. THis file is included
with the OCCULT2.EXE file. Apart from advising of certain files that can be
deleted, it advises of changes to the STARCAT.DAT file which MUST be
made.
***********************************
D. Herald
Good luck on your observations!
Email webmaster@lunar-occultations.com should you encounter problems
downloading.
Email David Herald should you encounter problems with the installation.
June 25, 1999
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