Observation and analysis of lunar occultations of stars with an emphasis on improvements to data acquisition instrumentation and reduction techniques

A program of observation and analysis of lunar occultations was conceived, developed, and carried out using the facilities of the University of Florida's Rosemary Hill Observatory (RHO). The successful implementation of the program required investigation into several related areas. First, after an upgrade to the RHO 76-cm. reflecting telescope, a microprocessor controlled fast photoelectric data acquisition system was designed and built for the occultation data acquisition task. Second, the currently available model-fitting techniques used in the analysis of occultation observations were evaluated. A number of numerical experiments on synthesized and observational data were carried out to improve the performance of the numerical techniques. Among the numerical methods investigated were solution schemes employing partial parametric adjustment, parametric grouping into computational subsets (randomly and on the basis the correlation coefficients), and preprocessing of the observational data by a number of smoothing techniques for a variety of noise conditions. Third, a turn-key computational software system, incorporating data transfer, reduction, graphics, and display, was developed to carry out all the necessary and related computational tasks in an interactive environment. Twenty-four occultation observations were obtained during the period March 1983 to March 1984