Dietmar Büttner

Germany

Lunar limb profiles created within the project MOONLIMB have been available and used by the programmes GRAZEREG und LOW since 1997. MOONLIMB can be considered to be the most comprehensive and most accurate set of limb data derived from lunar occultation observations so far. The uptodate version ML2002A was released in December 2002. It covers two regions with ? 30° in Axis Angle (AA) around the northern and southern lunar poles. Altogether, 63.438 points within a step wide of 1.0° in the librations and 0.2° in AA are contained.
For details see at  http://www.iota-es.de/moon.html.

Although the most accurate algorithms and lunar / stellar positions are used, there are several disagreements with recent grazing occultation observations due to any problems in the quality of a few single profile points.

Investigations by the author revelaed that there are some kinds of problems in the observation and station data. Many 'unaccounted' errors are caused by incorrect and imcomplete reports sent in by the observers. Another serious source of possible errors are occultations of double stars due to problems in the correct identification and specification of the concerned components by the observer. Especially this error source is very difficult to overcome.

As there are several 100.000 observations to process, all these problems can't be handled manually, but only by an appropriatly intelligent software solution.
Henceforth, for the near future the focus of the MOONLIMB work is set to a more detailed automated assessment of the observations and to the automated evaluation of double star occultation observations.
 
 
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