Performing Automated, High-Speed Photometry on Occulting, Small Outer Solar System Bodies

Monitoring stellar occultations provides a powerful means to measure the shapes and sizes of small Solar System bodies, but produces large quantities of image data which can be laborious to analyse. An automated Python-based software, occfind, was written for performing high-speed aperture photometry on spool files packed with large volumes of images from the 1. 54m Danish Telescope. occfind processed 11 spool files at a maximum rate of around 4–6 minutes per spool file, without image reduction. From these files, 3 occultation events were detected. The measured chord lengths are consistent with prior size measurements of these small bodies.