In addition to the information about different recording and timing systems that David posted in his recent messages about this event, if you only have a CCD camera attached to your telescope and you can run it in video mode, you can contribute to this event.  Just turn the video mode on at least 1 minute before the predicted event time and run it until at least one minute after the predicted event time.  Send the .mov (or whatever file format is created) to me and I can do the light curve analysis.

Of course, if possible, we would love to have some type of accurate time stamp on the video.  The easiest and cheapest way to do that with a CCD camera video is to use either the Android or iPhone flash tag system.  Apply a precisely timed flash tag toward the beginning and the end of the recording.  Longer flashes (1-2 seconds) are better than very short flashes.

[Another option would be to record audible time signals, as I described in my “Time the Sat” item, the 4th slide of https://occultationpages.com/events/temp/TimingOptions.pdf . But a flash tag like you suggest would be more accurate since, using only video, it doesn’t depend on the video/audio synchronization of the video recording. The “Occult Flash Tag” app works for this on my Android phone; in a test, I went to the settings to change the default flash to 2000 ms. I could only set the time of the flashes to integer minutes; I don’t know if there’s a way to also set the seconds. So maybe you should say to turn on the video mode 2 minutes before the event, and turn it off 2 minutes after, and set your flashes with “Occult Flash Tag” so they both go off during those 4 minutes of recording.  It took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to use Occult Flash Tag; if you or Ted could write a short tutorial about using it (maybe something like that already exists), we could post that with your suggestion. And recent ideas about preventing saturation with the flash might be of some use, although I suppose, if we only care about timing to the nearest video frame, which is a little better than the accuracy of the timing through NTP, that might not make much difference. Don’t want to make things more complicated for the observers, if we don’t have to. David]

Good luck if you can try to observe this event!

Tony George
Scottsdale, AZ