Independent Verification of Potential Venus/Regulus Occultation Discovery

[ipartecom]

Can anyone suggest how I would Verify a Venus/Regulus Occultation I found while searching Stellarium that predates the oldest confirmed occultation by thousands of years.

Current Verification Status: I have cross-referenced this event using NASA JPL Horizons, which independently confirms Venus's position, however, I was not able to independently verify Regulus since NASA JPL Horizons does not support this. I did try occult and Gaia-sky apps but could not get either to behave.

Thanks in advance. :)

[gzotti]

You face a similar problem as the developers. You can try other desktop planetaria and see if their implementations of (likely) the same algorithms and models come to the same result. Make sure you have read Appendix F. If you are not using positions from DE441 in Stellarium, the observation is likely wrong. But using Horizons is also not fully independent when it provides DE441 positions...

[ipartecom]

Hi Georg,

I downloaded DE441 and added it to the C:\Users\julia\AppData\Roaming\Stellarium\ephem. The ephem folder was initially missing so I created it per google AI instructions. I restarted my computer but DE411 it is still grayed out under settings. Can you help me realize how to activate DE441.bsp I appreciate your time. Thank you.

[alex-w]

Please read paragraph 5.5.3 in Stellarium User Guide

[ipartecom]

Thank you Alex. I did read 5.5.3 and I added the file path to config.ini and still grayed out. thank you for your time. This is a bit more technical then I realized. Even chatGPT and Google AI have sent me in 20 different directions.

[gzotti]

Follow the User Guide to the letter. The file is not ending with bsp!