Sharin’ Charon (Show #19)

By Aaron on July 25, 2005 at 11:23 pm | In Slacker Astronomy Archival Podcasts |

Castdate: 050725
Title: Sharin’ Charon
Written By: Aaron Price
Disembodied Voices: Pamela Gay, Travis Searle, Bill The Roommate
Engineered By: Travis

• Transcript
• Animation of the Occultation
• Space.com coverage of the 1999 Pluto/Charon imaging

Here is a snippet from IAUC #8570 which announced the results of the recent occultation:

OCCULTATION BY PLUTO I (CHARON)
    L. A. Young, C. B. Olkin, and E. F. Young, Southwest Research
Institute; and R. G. French, Wellesley College, report their
observations of an occultation on July 11 of the star 2UCAC
26257135 by Pluto I (Charon).  E. F. Young and K. Shoemaker
observed with 0.2-s integration times using the visitor instrument
PHOT (unfiltered) on the 4.2-m SOAR telescope at Cerro Pachon.  C.
Olkin, C. Ruhland, and L. A. Young observed via a 240-s I-band
exposure trailed at 1".5/s with the 4-m Blanco telescope (+ Mosaic
II camera) at Cerro Tololo.  R. French, B. Gregory, L. A. Young,
and R. Galvez observed via 0.5-s I-band exposures using the 0.9-m
SMARTS telescope (+ Tek2K No. 3 CCD camera) at Cerro Tololo.  All
three sites report durations of 55.3 +/- 0.2 s.  The chord length
is 1179 +/- 4 km, which serves as a lower limit on the diameter
from these telescopes.  No obvious atmosphere was detected.
Immersion and emersion times (+/- 0s.01) at SOAR were 3h36m16s.19
and 3h37m11s.26 UT.

Artistic rendering of Pluto/Charon sharing an atmosphere: