Welcome Address

Dr. David W. Dunham

President of the

International Occultation Timing Association (IOTA)
Greenbelt, Maryland, U.S.A.

The International Occultation Timing Association welcomes you to ESOP 1999! The last years of the 20th century have been exciting ones for occultations, with ever more powerful yet ever cheaper computers greatly facilitating the prediction and analysis of these fleeting phenomena. At the same time, sensitive yet inexpensive and easy-to-use small video cameras, camcorders, and specialized equipment such as the IOTA Occultation Camera have brought precise timing and recording to an ever larger number of observers. As spacecraft make more precise observations of the Universe, occultation observers are challenged to meet the leading edge of astronomical research. During this year's European Symposium on Occultation Projects, you will learn the latest techniques that are being used to predict, observe, and analyze occultations, and will see the observational advances and results that have been obtained during the past year.

IOTA has benefited greatly by the astrometric revolution possible with the Hipparcos satellite data that became available in 1997. We can now predict grazes and asteroidal occultations much more accurately than before, and perform analyses that were previously impossible. We are still pushing the limits with asteroidal occultation predictions, but at least now if you observe within our updated paths two or three times, you will see an occultation at least one of those times. Occultations can resolve faint components of very close double stars that were missed by Hipparcos and by ground-based speckle observations. And the recent discovery of a satellite of the asteroid 45 Eugenia, combined with Galileo's discovery of Dactyl, shows that some of the secondary occultations reported during past asteroidal occultations may have also been caused by satellites.

We hope that you will enjoy the meeting lectures, planned excursions, and the August 11th total solar eclipse. And especially we look forward to the meeting breaks and social functions, when we can meet so many observers from around the world who share our enthusiasm for occultations. There will be many fruitful discussions; at last, we can see the faces behind the e-mail addresses that we have used to communicate.

We thank our hosts for working very hard to make such excellent arrangements for ESOP and for our stay in Stuttgart!

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