Lunar occultations of 184 stellar sources

At the ESO Very Large Telescope, it is possible to achieve about 1 milliarcsecond (mas) resolution and detect sources as faint as K~12mag. We have taken advantage of a passage of the Moon over two crowded and reddened regions in the direction of the inner part of the Galactic bulge to obtain a high number of occultation light curves over two half nights.

Our goal was to detect and characterize new binary systems, and to investigate highly extincted and relatively unknown infrared sources in search of circumstellar shells and similar peculiarities. Our target list included a significant number of very late-type stars, but the majority of the sources was without spectral classification.