IOTA 2021 DeBoll Award Winners

Bob is an electrical engineer and computer expert. After he and Tony George went to see a Space Shuttle Launch, Tony discussed with him the difficulties in analyzing noisy occultation videos/light curves.

Bob then developed the successful program Occular in 2007. Occular takes advantage of the fact that Limovie’s signal and noise data is Gaussian, thus least squares can be used to determine D & R times. In Occular, Bob perfected the use of sub-frame timing.

Bob then introduced the program R-OTE, which emphasized the statistically rigorous computation of occultation timing parameters.

In 2017 Bob introduced PYOTE at the IOTA meeting, the multi-platform to replace Occular and R-OTE. It works with Windows, Mac and Linux.

He then introduced PyMovie.

Bob also developed ArtStar – to test CCD cameras by introducing an artificial star to simulate occultations.