I'm trying to picture in my head how ecliptic lat and long are used to define an object's spin axis.

Is it by defining the location of the object's north pole as seen from the center of the object?

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Hi Wprion,

All the information is available through DAMIT database. You will find a link to it on our main page:
https://www.asteroidsathome.net/ -> DAMIT
or direcly
DAMIT ->Documentation.
Then you may want to take a look on Occultations (OCC*.pdf) section and read the "Combining asteroid models derived by lightcurve inversion with asteroidal occultation silhouettes" paper by Josef Durec (the preprint PDF 468 KiB).

At 2.2 he says:

All models were derived by the lightcurve inversion method described in Kaasalainen and Torppa (2001) and Kaasalainen et al. (2001).
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Their orientation in space at any given time can be computed from the ecliptic longitude and latitude (λp, βp) of the spin axis direction (the z axis in the asteroid Cartesian coordinate frame), the sidereal rotation period P and the initial rotation angle ϕ0 given for some epoch.

Cheers,
Georgi

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