Early August at Adler & waiting for photometric eclipse ingress

Adler Planetarium - what a splendid astronomical facility - our compliments to Lucy, Larry, Rebecca, Aaron and the CS/Adler gang for hosting a marvelous first Citizen Sky workshop, Aug. 4-7, 2009.  Among the many meeting highlights was a report that appears to clinch the evidence for the existence of a cold disk in the system, a chance to meet with many key participants like Arne Henden, the Citizen Sky senior staff and Jeff Hopkins, Gerry Samolyk, Mike Simonsen - veteran observers, as well as meet the newer participants to the project (Hi PJ, Rhonda, Alice, Barry, Bill, Brian, Mark, Niko...).  Hopefully everyone who attended came away with new contacts and ideas that will carry us far.

We now have a juicy moment where the spectroscopic evidence (so far, increases in the neutral potassium K I line) indicate that the cold disk may be encroaching, but the photometric evidence is mixed (V band in particular has not faded).  Thinking about the decrease in eclipse duration during the past several cycles, suggests that ingress could be 2 to 4 weeks later than the time 27.1 years prior to this.  Hence, this clearly is the time to get your reference observations, particularly visual and unfiltered digital camera ones - to provide comparison with what we expect to begin happening.  Reminder: this ingress will probably require 2 to 3 months for the star to fade visually from the current 3.0 to the eclipse 3.8 magnitude level.  Be sure to try the 10 star training program and to report your estimates at the Citizen Sky webform: Get started with... Observing... Reporting links.  I'll be getting back to my telescope this week too.