1. What's New in Occult v4.0.5
2. How to Obtain Occult v4.0.5
3. First Time Installation Instructions and Notes
4. Updating Occult 4.0.x to Occult 4.0.5
5. Becoming Familiar with the Program
6. Copyright Issues

For over 25 years the Japanese Hydrographic Department has been the agency responsible for collecting lunar occultation observations. That responsibility has now been transferred to the International Occultation Timing Association (IOTA). Occult 4.0.5 has involved extensive revisions to fully support the processing and archiving of lunar occultation observations. Additionally there have been a range of updates and improvements, with the following being the more noteworthy:

• A download form to facilitate easy downloading and updating of data files
• An estimate of the star's diameter for lunar occultations and grazes
• Capability to email lunar occultation reports from within Occult
• Update of the JPL planetary Ephemeris source – to DE414 and DE421
• Revision of the Tycho2 catalogue, to incorporate the star positions and proper motions from the Hipparcos2 catalogue
• Complete rework of the files of historical lunar occultation observations, including a new reduction using the DE421 ephemeris
• Plot of the results of an asteroid occultation – added a display of the potential magnitude variation from the displayed ellipse – to correlate with photometric light curves.

1. Download the files shown below by right clicking on the filename and doing a "save as"
2. Order the CD (all files), and have it mailed to you.

To order the CD, send $5 with your name and address to: W.Robinson, 515 W. Kump, Bonner Springs KS, 66012, USA. You can send check, money order, or cash. NOTE: Anyone outside the continental USA should send money order or some similar draft in the amount of $10. My bank will not handle Canadian or overseas personal checks due to the routing number. If you use PayPal, you can transfer funds to my account. Account name: webmaster@lunar-occultations.com

The following notes are intended to provide guidance for the installation issues, and an overview of the functionality and new features.

Occult v4 has been written in the language C#, and runs in the Net framework.

Before you can run the new version, you must have the Net Framework V2 installed on your computer. You can download this from the Microsoft Download center here. Or do a Google Search for ‘Net Framework V2’ to get the download site from Microsoft. If you are running Vista, Net V2 is already on your computer. If you have been running OccultWatcher, you have the Net framework installed.

The files you need to download are (use right click on your mouse and do a "save as"):

• Setup.exe - 336k - [Aug 2008 release] Not needed for Windows XP or Vista
• occult4 installer.msi - 24.8M - v4.0.5.0 - [Aug 28, 2008 release]
  - These files install Occult 4 – apart from the next two large files. Place these files in the same directory, and then run Setup. The default installation path is ‘...\Program Files\Occult 4

When you first run the program, you will be taken to a page that displays a range of default settings. You can change the settings here at any time after Occult has been installed. However at this stage you should do the following:

• insert your site details in the box Site details – low precision;
• insert your email address for the FTP anonymous password in the box FTP URL’s;
• insert the details of you email SMTP server. This is required to allow observations to me emailed from within Occult
• indicate whether GoogleEarth is installed on your computer, in the GoogleEarth box;

You will then be taken to the download page, where you can download the latest versions of a number of data files, and some large catalog files. The three large files that you should seriously consider downloading are: