This is the first image of Jupiter since the 2022 opposition (4 days past opposition).
Altitude was at max , seeing and transparency were average, but the focus still was not sharp. Think maybe it is time for another collimation test.
The moon callisto is just visible to the upper left and Io to the center right.
Greetings!
Another great fireball event captured by the UWO Yarker 10 (SCGO allsky2) camera system Friday evening at 20:36:05 EDT.
At least 5 people saw this visually, directly at the 22nd annual Fall’N’Stars Star Party in southern Prince Edward County Ontario on the weekend. All of the others were looking elsewhere, only to see the ground light, up, moving shadows, and attempted yelling at whattheythought were people and headlights or white flashlights!
The video shows a 5 second event with a lot of flickering/breakup
The allsky camera system shows the event well to the south. At FNS2022, the meteor started nearly overhead and tracked south.
We believe this means that it was relatively low altitude.
The video is below:
The first draft of the results of the 2021-2022 garlic crop at SCGO.
There is still more data that needs to be transcribed but this is the first look.
Approximately 95-3=92 types of garlic and 1464 bulbs of garlic were harvested in July 2022.
We actually planted more but lost a few types over the winter.
The average heaviest bulbs types were:
Armenian (54g)
italian purple (2019) (56g)
khabar (52g)
mennonite (50g)
newfoundland (70g)
northern quebec (54g)
roja (99g)
rosewood (51g)
russian red (56g)
Greetings!
This is Autostakkert! v3.1.4 – 64 bit
I have gone through three computers in the last two years, that I use for astronomical image processing. Each one was a little faster than the others and where we stand today is a fairly new
Ivanova2021 win10pro64bit 21H2 Core I5-6500 @3.2GHz, 8GB; 240GB SSD 8GB DDR4 1x8GB (4 slots) sda 240GB SSD lexar sdb 6TB WDBlue data; sdc 4TB external USB3 data backup 1920×1080 HDMI; 6xUSB3; 2xUSB2 $260CDN x2DP,x1VGA BIOS 2021Nov18
And it is still TOO SLOW. I think that maybe I am processing larger images, to higher degrees of quality? So I thought.. where may there be a potential bottleneck? Don’t know… have to run some benchmarks.
Part 2 Update.
The 1x8GB DDR4 RAM stick arrived, was installed and is up and running. The benchmarks were rerun and this is the results
16GB using 12.5GB RAM 93% total in use
1/4 thread stacking 990 sec about 3% improvement
2/4 thread stacking 510 sec about 3% improvement
3/4 thread stacking 349 sec about 3% improvement
4/4 thread stacking 269 sec about 18% improvement
8GB
1/4 thread stacking 1017 sec
2/4 thread stacking 527 sec
3/4 thread stacking 363 sec
4/4 thread stacking 327 sec
You will note that it used up to 12.5GB of RAM during processing… more RAM than the whole computer did previously… so the short answer is yes, Autostakkert was RAM limited/bottlenecked with only 8GB.
I am unsure why there is such a huge improvement when using 4 threads versus the others.. will have to try some more examples I guess.
The next obvious experiment is to buy *MORE RAM* and try it again!
Greetings!
This is Autostakkert! v3.1.4 – 64 bit
I have gone through three computers in the last two years, that I use for astronomical image processing. Each one was a little faster than the others and where we stand today is a fairly new
Ivanova2021 win10pro64bit 21H2 Core I5-6500 @3.2GHz, 8GB; 240GB SSD 8GB DDR4 1x8GB (4 slots) sda 240GB SSD lexar sdb 6TB WDBlue data; sdc 4TB external USB3 data backup 1920×1080 HDMI; 6xUSB3; 2xUSB2 $260CDN x2DP,x1VGA BIOS 2021Nov18
And it is still TOO SLOW. I think that maybe I am processing larger images, to higher degrees of quality? So I thought.. where may there be a potential bottleneck? Don’t know… have to run some benchmarks.
So I took a sample image, filename: 2022-09-03-0312_9_kk-L-Jupiter.ser
filesize 5,339,633KB = 5.3GB
8522 frames, 8bpp
file on local C:\data SSD drive
And ran it through autostakkert! v3 four times, increasing the thread options from 1/4 to 4/4.
There is INDEED a difference!
The process was the best 10% using 75 Alignment points, drizzle x1.5 and saved as a .PNG
The CPU% and RAM% did increase and the processing time did drop:
number of threads 1
CPU% 27%
RAM GB 3.8
stacking time 1017 sec
number of threads 2
CPU% 40%
RAM GB 3.9
stacking time 527 sec
number of threads 3
CPU% 55%
RAM GB 5.6
stacking time 363 sec
number of threads 4
CPU% 75%
RAM GB 5.6
stacking time 327 sec
So far so good… use all the threads. Next up.. RAM. at 8GB and it seems that autostakkert uses all of what is available.
Soooo.. we have ordered more RAM and will rerun the above processes with 16GB onboard! DDR4 !
And again a first in ages… a second imaging run in the same day, the first early on Friday morning, this second run late on Friday evening. Jupiter is still very low in the east.. only 29 degrees altitude .. and boy is it fuzzy!
The north equatorial belt is fuzzy and only really identifiable because I know north is up and it is a little darker and thinner than the southern belt.
This is the best 25% of 4500 frames and the exposure was also much longer than normal due to the secondary mirror dewing up.
We are still working on that!
And this is from the same day as last but in the evening observing session… first time in ages that there was a morning and an evening session!
Too bad that seeing and transparency were poor. This is the best of of 12 runs of 180 seconds.. not nearly as good as the past few days.
Altitude was only 25 degrees and this was the best 25% of 4000 frames.
The Cassini division is barely visible and only about 5 cloud bands can be seen in the northern hemisphere.
The 2022 Garlic Fest in Verona has come and gone .. and that reminds me that the SCGO garlic harvest has come and gone as well.
The weather was perfect and the vendors numbered a few more than last year. It was busy but not overwhelmingly so. We were able to browse, engage with the vendors and make purchases without much waiting if any at all.
It was a 2nd good year in a row for our SCGO garlic yield. The tape irrigation system we believe plays a large part of it.. regular morning watering for a couple of hours keeps the garlic well hydrated without the ups and downs of floods and droughts.
From the morning of Friday 2022 Sept 02 after doing some runs of imaging Saturn.
As it turns out, this 4 or 5th imaging session, the exposure started to drop and it has turned out NOT to be bad transparency over Lake Ontario but rather the secondary mirror dewing up.
This was good to know. During the day we added a 25″ dew heating strap to the outside of the OTA near the primary mirror. This will help keep it from dewing up and hopefully some heat on the interior will waft up the OTA and help keep the secondary from dewing up later tonight.
The Great Red Spot had just past center and was heading off the field of view. 36 runs in total were completed, most under mirror dewup conditions.
After cleaning the optics, there were still some dust motes that came along.
Tests were completed with the best 10%, 25% and 40% and the best 10% were used for these images.
Saturn on the morning of Friday 2022Sept02. North is up, altitude only 28 degrees above the horizon. I count seven distinct cloud bands north of the rings. I found a good map from The Strolling Astronomer, the Journal of the ALPO, Spring 2007 issue Volume 49 #2, page 39 to help name some of these cloud bands.
There is definite chromatic abberation going on, blue on top, red on bottom.
This was the best 10% of 5700 frames captured using the 20cm Vixen 200L telescope, the Antares x2 barlow and the ZWO ASI 290MC camera.
This is the massive planet Jupiter in the early morning hours of Sunday 2022August28.
There are 39 usable runs of 180seconds each with a 120second delay between each, resulting in 12 runs an hour, so this is about 3 hours 15 minutes to watch the Great Red Spot traverse across the field of view.
Interestingly, Jupiter was before at and after its highest altitude, but the exposure had to change from 10ms to 35ms to keep the exposure relatively the same. There seemed to be a lot of bad transparency hanging out over Lake Ontario and affecting the Jupiter Imaging Session.
One of the changes in the last year was the use of an equatorial mount instead of an alt-az mount. During the course of the nights runs, you will not that Jupiter does not change its orientation, like it would with alt-az.
This is near peak altitude, which is still much better than years past! And opposition is coming up at the end of September. It is just shy of 45 degrees altitude in this selected mid run image, showing the GRS centered in the field of view.
The planet itself has an apparent diameter of a little more than 48 arc seconds.
This was a 180 second run resulting in 7567 frames captured, each at about 20ms. After processing the best 10%, 25% and 40%, I chose to further process only the best 10%.
The processing pipeline is: autostakkert!v3 for align, stacking and drizzling x1.5, registax v6 for wavelet processing, and Imagemagick for annotation by parsing the firecapture text log file.
I still hope to add another step or two afterward, perhaps some contrast and colour saturation.
Below is an animated .GIF for the 39 resulting imaging runs for the morning from 04:42 UTC to 07:53 UTC = 00:42 EDT to 03:53 EDT. This may have been my longest ever continuous imaging run of Jupiter.
This is the Ring Planet Saturn in the early morning hours of Sunday 2022 August 28th.. just past midnight actually local Eastern Daylight Time.
This is near peak altitude, which is still quite relatively low, at almost 30 degrees above the southern horizon.
The planet itself has an apparent diameter of 18.6 arc seconds, with the rings almost double that.
This was a 180 second run resulting in 4100 frames captured, each at about 43ms. After processing the best 10%, 25% and 40%, I chose to further process only the best 10%.
The processing pipeline is: autostakkert!v3 for align, stacking and drizzling x1.5, registax v6 for wavelet processing, and Imagemagick for annotation by parsing the firecapture text log file.
I still hope to add another step or two afterward, perhaps some contrast and colour saturation.
Some other members of the club took an image like this and processed it in Adobe photoshop, splitting the image into 3 colour channels (RGB) and then aligning them to overcome the Atmospheric Dispersion caused by looking through so much airmass. In this image without that additional work, you can se in the back of the rings, a blue tinge on the top of the ring and a red tinge on the bottom of the ring.
You can also purchase a piece of equipment, an ADC, from ZWO as perhaps elsewhere, to correct this at the source.
Below is the animated .GIF of the seven runs of Saturn showing shorter 30 second runs to record seeing, and spotting of a dust mote and shifting the planet to another section of the sensor.
