Lennox Agricultural Society Plant Sale
(not to be confused with the Lennox and Addington Horticultural Society Plant Sale)

Saturday, May 12th, 2012 8 am – 3 pm
Napanee Fairgrounds, 170 York Street, Napanee

The time has come to plant your gardens, and there’s no better place to get your supplies than at the Lennox Agricultural Society Plant Sale. There’s lots of annuals and perrenials to choose from. There will be coffee, cookies and muffins available. All proceeds go to the agricultural building. If you have any plants, gardening tools, pots, gardening books or decorative garden items to donate, please contact Betty Austin at 613-388-1105.

Our seed potatos from last fall were too eager to get into the ground… long long roots growing even when being stored in our dark cool cold room. Enough was enough and they had to go in the ground.. and so they did on Saturday May 5th, 2012.

We have 16 types this year including:
1) Norgold russett
2) Epicure
3) Irish Cobbler
4) Caribe
5) Bluenose
6) Warba
7) Superior
Norland
9) Carola
10) Morning Glory
11) Brigus
12) Russian Blue
13) Green Mountain
14) White Rose
15) Blue Victor
16) Yukon Gold

Each get at least five hills, some up to ten.
They are planted in Veg beds #4A and 4B, totaling about 350 ft^2.

Last night was the year’s largest and brightest moon.
It was in fact bright. It washed out most of the nights allsky camera imagery. But at 04:34 this morning (Sunday May 6th, 2012) it did pick up something that I hope is not just a lens flare from the moon.
What looks like a very bright meteor in the north northwest flared across at least 20 degrees of sky.

For the last 5 days now, our automated routines for copying data from home up to this starlightcascade web server have failed.
We are using linux fedora 15 and a client program called lftp to push files up on regular schedules to a server running linux fedora 16 and a server side program called vsftpd.
The system has been running flawlessly for some years and now we are plagued by partial connections, timeouts and no files transferred.
Instead of very fast uploads completed we are sitting at
`index2.htm’ at 0 (0%) [Sending data]
for minutes on end.
Computers at both ends have been restarted. The house router and switches have been restarted.
We’ve tried other ftp clients like Filezilla from other systems within the house. Same problems.
We’ve tried FTPing to other servers in the same area as this one. Same problems.
What’s left? Did the Internet Service Provider change something?
More tests continue along with some alternative methods such as using rsync will be coming up.

Depending of course if there is any time left in the day… Game of Thrones is on tonight

On Monday April 30th, 2012
7 of us planted 8 more rows in the community garden.

Row 11: lettuce starts (chefs choice) plus spinach seed to complete the row
Row:12: spinach seed, and lettuce seed (north pole – head)
Row 13: onions
Row 14: peas (dakota?)
Row 15: peas
Row 16: beets (early wonder)
Row 17: beets

I came across a great story this morning over at
arstechnica.com about the first really big auroral storm in modern history.

“Noon approached on September 1, 1859, and British astronomer Richard Christopher Carrington was busy with his favorite pastime: tracking sunspots”

It is now May 1st, 2012. Last night’s low temperature of 7 deg C was the warmest we have had in weeks.
The night before was -5. All of this cold weather has taught us… do not put out the garden hoses so early! This is about the 4th occurance of a leak, split hose, split nozzle or split metal ring pieces in the hoses this spring. Arrggg.
Thanks to our friendly neighbour who keeps coming over to turn off the tap when they see streams of water pouring out of the system.
As inconvenient as it may be, we will have to leave the system off in the spring and fall when there is a danger of frost, when not in use. Period.

It was International Astronomy Day on Saturday April 28th, 2012 and members and friends of The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada – Kingston Centre were out in force at Confederation Basin in front of Kingston City hall from 1 to 3 pm.

We were observing the sun with solar filters and the 4 or 5 groups of sunspots on it. There was a lot of cloud coming and going and in some cases the sunspots did disappear.

We were also passing out Transit of Venus glasses along with a brochure reminding people of the Tuesday June 5th, 2012 event. RASC Starfinders and Moon Gazers were also passed out.

The telescopes on set were: Coronado Solarmax 60, Corondao PST, a Meade DS90 with a Baader film filter, a Bausch & Lomb Schmidt-Cassegrain with a Thousand Oaks filter, a Meade SC with a baader film filter.

Good location, traffic came in groups on a cold windy day. Surprisingly we had many tourists from out of town including overseas and the United States.
Total guest count was 74.

There was some minor aurora seen last night from our location
today20120426.gif (38mb) from about 22:00-01:00
We of course missed it by sleeping on a Thursday night, resting for work the next day.
There is now a listing of good aurora nights on the Allsky1 webpage

These are from the Black and white SBIG ST237A camera which was donated to us back in December 2006 by Robert Nemiroff at Michigan Tech. You can find more about his work here at asterisk.apod.com and here at
apod.nasa.gov