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D. W. Dunham (JHU-APL\&IOTA), D. Faust (CMU), W.H. Warren (RaytheonSTX\&IOTA), I. Sato (Nat'l Obs, Japan), E. Goffin (Agfa-Gevaert), M. Soma (Nat'l Obs, Japan)
We have collected observations of over 170 occultations of stars by asteroids that have been made since the first one by Juno seen in Sweden in 1958. The timings and station coordinates have been placed in a database that will be accessible from the Web in October. Also, we have calculated ephemerides of the asteroids covering the dates of the events and have analyzed the observations to determine the sizes and elliptical shapes, many for the first time, for dozens of the occultations. In each case, we have computed the geocentric offset of the asteroid from the occulted star which, when applied to the Hipparcos or ACT data that are available for most of the stars, give highly accurate positions for the asteroids at the occultation epochs. We have also created a full-sky catalog of all stars with accurate astrometric data, starting with 117,955 stars from Hipparcos, then adding over 880,000 stars from ACT that are not in Hipparcos, and lesser numbers of stars from the Tycho, CMC, TAC, PPM, and ACRS catalogs for a total of 1,300,135 stars. The catalog has been matched with PPM to add PPM, SAO, DM, and HD numbers, when available, and spectral types. A zodiacal subset of the catalog will be used to compute more comprehensive lunar occultation predictions than have been available in the past. These catalogs will be made available by ftp.
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The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: david.dunham@jhuapl.edu