GLOBE at Night: encourages citizen-scientists worldwide to record the brightness of the night sky. During 2 weeks of moonless evenings, children and adults match the appearance of a constellation (Leo in the northern hemisphere and Crux or Leo in the southern hemisphere) with 7 star charts of progressively fainter stars found at globeatnight.org. They then submit their choice of star chart on-line with their date, time and location to help create a light pollution map worldwide.
Earth Hour 2011
Go Beyond the HOUR!
Saturday March 26th, 2011 – 8:30 pm to 9:30 pm
The theme of this year’s Earth Hour is “Go Beyond the Hour”. People around the world are being encouraged to conserve energy during the scheduled Earth Hour and to continue doing it throughout the year. Queen’s University plans to participate in this initiative and is asking students, faculty and staff to do the same.
The university remains committed to reducing its overall energy use and we need your help to accomplish this goal. With a few small changes to your daily routine you too can make a difference.
Physical Plant Services will:
v Turn off all non-essential heating systems;
v Turn off most non-essential lights. Exceptions include emergency lights, which are hard wired and for safety and security will not be turned off. A few buildings on campus that are open late or allow 24-hour access, including Stauffer Library and Goodes Hall will also stay lit.
v Monitor power consumption levels before, during and after Earth Hour.
Do your part at work:
v Switch off lights when leaving a room.
v Switch off computers, monitors, printers, scanners, radios and other equipment when they’re not in use, and before a meeting, lunch or end-of-day.
v Use power bars to eliminate phantom loads.
v Enable the energy saving functions on your computer equipment.
v Dress comfortably for the weather and adjust your layers before adjusting the thermostat.
Do your part at home:
v Lower the set point of your thermostat.
v Use low-flow plumbing fixtures.
v Open curtains to allow for maximum sunlight in the winter and close the curtains to keep out the sunlight in the summer.
v Take advantage of energy incentives like the current saveONenergy program.
v Celebrate Earth Hour in downtown Kingston at Springer Market Square for the 4th annual “Kingston Unplugged” concert.
Turn Off Your Lights For Earth Hour
8:30 P.M. TO 9:30 P.M. SATURDAY, MARCH 26, 2011
Kingston will participate in Earth Hour in 2011. Between 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 26, lights will go off around the world to mark Earth Hour — a global event to acknowledge humanity’s impact on climate change.
Always a good idea to prep for a star party… in advance!
Case in point, Fall’N'Stars 2010
Last year, you may remember, we took the Centre’s portable power pack (the big one on wheels) to use on the Douglas telescope and it failed miserably dew wise. We opened it up to discover that 3 of the cells inside had ruptured and had leaked and basically we wrote off the 7 year old unit.
This year, the last item that I packed was a car-sized deep
cycle/rechargable Nautilus battery.
We hook up the dew gear on our 20cm dob and none of the lights on the controller come on. Hmm. another bad controller? (We had out Kendrick controller die a couple of years back).
After a lot of wiggling wires, we gave up on the battery and hooked into the vehicle power. That worked! lights, power and heat on the eyepiece.
Back home I took that large battery. hmm read only 3 volts DC. Hook it up to the trickle charger. Nothing… the charger says there is nothing there.
Hook it up to the regular large battery charger. hmmm no current
flowing.
So I opened up the battery lids.. Hmmm. looks pretty dry. 4 litres of
distilled water later the charger started working.
Yay! It starts to bubble as hydrogen gas is produced as a charging
byproduct?
A few hours later I find a large puddle of water on the battery, in the
box and leaked out onto the table…
hmmm not water.. sulphuric acid!
A box of baking soda later, the acid is neutralized and the battery
rinsed off and taking a break until I find a better charging location.
But the battery is now reading over 12vdc!
The moral of the story… better prep work (and battery maintenance!)
will make your observing session a better experience.
We haven’t been over to Wolfe Island in months, but finally had the opportunity earlier this week.
Our primary reason was to go and visit some gardens.. some very nice large gardens… on the order of acres large.
The other big draw was the completed 86 turbine Wolfe Island Wind Farm. We were passing through some thunderstorms and the turbines were spinning!
The are amazing! Very quiet as well… just the minimal noise of the whine of the turbines. You can see their almost realtime power output at
http://www.sygration.com/
We’ve had a few short power outages thanks to passing lightning storms plus some outages of the main data logging workstation we have that are a little mysterious. After looking at it for a bit, we think the problem was an old UPS that the system was plugged into, that just decided to turn itself off every so often. So a new UPS was in order. After comparing prices at Future Shop and Best Buy, we found a good APC BackUPS N700 at Costco for $90. The next nearest from the competitors was a BackUPS 550 for over $100.
The radioroom system was shut down, the old UPS came out, the new UPS went in and everything came back up again.
The weather station came up by itself (never a problem); the FM Meteor Detection system needed to be manually started, as does the Solar Radio Telescope software.
The wireless router and power to the weather station also went onto the UPS… hopefully no more wireless disconnects for the forseeable future.
The intent here is to simply prevent problems caused by the really short disruptions in power.
Another spring week off from work to catch up on the yardwork. 8 of 9 days we worked to the point of insanity prepping the yard, the gardens, the pool, this and that and the other. Good news is, there were no real show stoppers .. except maybe one. A young raccoon decided our yard was a nice place to visit.
He cleaned out the robins nest with at least 2 young birds and a few eggs in it,
broke various bird feeders and went up our back deck tree for most of one morning. He’s been back pretty well every night since, looking for more trouble.
Little muddy footprints and tufts of hair on the fence are all he has left behind recently.
But in other great news, the solar pool heater is up an running as is the pool, all of the veg were planted and we haven’t had frost. The new Veg4 deer fence went up on time and a new gate was built to keep out the pesky critters.
Tent worms finally showed up but we caught hem early and they seem to be pretty few and far between. Spruce budworms have also appeared on a couple of trees but again, we caught them early.
Grass cutting… went to 3″ for the first time this year but then back to 4″ as a standard for cutting every two weeks for the summer.
Complete construction of the adirondack chairs after three days of staining. Very nice and peaceful sitting by the pond, except of course for the noise and dust from the passing dump trucks.
Overall the weather was almost perfect… sometimes we even had a day or two of few if any black flies!
Unfortunately time has run out and the todo list is still two pages long.
Sunday saw the Greenup! festival at the Kingston K-Rock centre.
We barely found out about it a couple of days in advance but luckily were able to change plans in order to attend early in the morning. It was a great sunny day albeit a little cool. The first keynote speaker was Leonard Lee, president of one of favourite companies, Lee Valley Tools.
He was good to listen to and we ended up hoping they would open up a store in Kingston so we could work there.
The afternoon speaker was Gillian Deacon, ex-past-cohost of Daily Planet. She addressed her new book, Green for Life, which we picked up and had signed at the event.
In between we had a tour of the LEED silver facility, going back into the Command Centre and some of the mechanical areas. There were 51 exhibitors there and it took us a good hour to slowly travel the aisles, stopping to read each display and asking questions of folks there.
A good event, although what the (&#)4 the city of kingston is thinking about outrageous parking charges on a Sunday in the local lots. Disgusting!
At the event we chatted with city councillor Leonore Foster, learned about the City of Kingston Goal of becoming the most sustainable city in Canada, and filled out some survey questions.
The great Stone Mills Solar Project is one step closer to reality.
While driving by the site this past weekend we came across the 2nd and 3rd signs of progress. The first sign was a chain link fence around the facility that went up some months ago.
Sunday we saw this sign and a real honest to goodness construction shack/trailer.
Groundbreaking was on April 21st, 2008 and not a lot of activity has been seen since.
Funny that the initial press release doesn’t quite jibe with the signage:
“In collaboration between SkyPower and SunEdison, the groundbreaking 300-Acre site to be finished at the end of 2009 will generate 19 megawatts of power for the region. Adler points out that this is one of many projects worldwide that have been fueling the demand for renewable energy.”
Phew… We had some kind of windstorm blow through here Christmas Eve. It turned out that it sounded worse than it really was. The weather station showed gusts up to only 40kph. It could have been all the rain that came along with it but in the end, we still have snow leftover. We had several brownouts during the strom last evening and possible through the night, as the house server rebooted a few times and came up this morning crashed. Guess that UPS needs replacing.
Last week the first of 86 Wind turbines went up on Wolfe Island.
As proposed, this is a 197.8 megawatts (“MW”) wind plant that consists of 86 wind turbines. Each turbine has a rated capacity of 2,300 kilowatts.
Today we can see three turbines up (but not yet operational) maybe two more towers and two cranes.
It is slated to be fully operational by June 2009.
