  Stellar occultations by asteroids and outer solar system bodies can offer
ground based observers with modest telescopes and camera equipment the
opportunity to probe the shape, size, atmosphere and attendant moons or rings
of these distant objects. The essential requirements of the camera and
recording equipment are: good quantum efficiency and low noise, minimal dead
time between images, good horological faithfulness of the image time stamps,
robustness of the recording to unexpected failure, and low cost. We describe
the Astronomical Digital Video occultation observing and recording System
(ADVS) which attempts to fulfil these requirements and compare the system with
other reported camera and recorder systems. Five systems have been built,
deployed and tested over the past three years, and we report on three
representative occultation observations: one being a 9 +/-1.5 second
occultation of the trans-Neptunian object 28978 Ixion (mv=15.2) at 3 seconds
per frame, one being a 1.51 +/-0.017 second occultation of Deimos, the 12~km
diameter satellite of Mars, at 30 frames per second, and one being a 11.04
+/-0.4 second occultation, recorded at 7.5 frames per second, of the main belt
asteroid, 361 Havnia, representing a low magnitude drop (Dmv = 0.4)
occultation.
