winter is coming? winter is here!

Jan25
by kevin on January 25, 2023 at 13:24 and modified on January 25, 2023. at 13:24
Posted In: life the universe and everything

And every year we have told ourselves we will complete the Library Project. For ten or more years now!
But this winter, we have started. We have even completed some segments of it!
Kim has the Gardening section indexed and sorted on the shelves.
We are also working on the Art section (possibly also finished now) and the big one, the Science section.
There is a treasure trove of books to be sure. Many over a hundred years old. True classics! Many more signed by author.. that we did not even realize at first.
But the bigger take from this is that they will be:
1) indexed
2) sorted on shelves
3) duplicate removed.. and boy do we have a lot of duplicates!

oh yes.. the science fiction library.. it too will be updated! Soon!

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Jupiter 20230107

Jan09
by kevin on January 9, 2023 at 12:57 and modified on January 9, 2023. at 13:03
Posted In: astronomy


The first imaging session of the 2023 season! It’s actually been almost 4 weeks since the last one of 2022… cloud cloud cloud.

So, this is Jupiter, the best of about 32 runs Saturday evening. Jupiter has already past the highest altitude and was setting into the evening sky. The moon Callisto is in the lower right and the Great Red Spot made an appearance as well.
seeing was poor. transparency was poor, full moon was up and there was a good wind from the North gusting from 12-20kph, which actually moved the scope around.

As seen on the image annotation, this 180 second run is the best 10% of 15K frames, with Jupiter’s altitude of about 33 degrees.
An lastly: a compiled GIF video

The last imaging run of the evening was ruined by the gusting wind blowing the telescope right off camera. This was about 00:50 UTC = 19:50 EST. There were a few clouds going through the field of view at times and they were sure lit up by the Full Moon.

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2023 arrives with cloud

Jan03
by kevin on January 3, 2023 at 15:24 and modified on January 3, 2023. at 15:29
Posted In: astronomy, life the universe and everything

Welcome to 2023, the year that is one older than the last.
2022 ended with a 2 or 3 day blizzard (we lost track inside the house). and now, in 2023 the grass is green the snow has melted but it is still cloud covered.

2022 saw Kevin complete 46 imaging sessions.
I hope to hit 50 imaging session in 2023.
I hope to complete my RASC Solar System Imaging Certificate.
I hope to complete my RASC Explore the Moon Certificate.
I hope to renovate the Serenity Observatory by rotating it 90 degrees CCW. Currently the building rolls off to the East, but still blocks the horizon above the treeline. This was too painful this past year when planetary objects appeared but could not be imaged before the clouds rolled in.

That’s about it for 2023 goals so far!
ok.. maybe a few more..
we currently run and operate:
a weather station
a superSID system
a RadioJOVE system
a raspberry pi based Allsky colour camera system
an older PC based Allsky monochrome camera system

We hope to add to it!
Perhaps one or more of the following:
* a data logging Sky Quality Meter like this one: http://unihedron.com/projects/sqm-lu-dl/
* a raspberry pi based seismograph like this: https://raspberryshake.org/
* a true 360 degree allsky colour camera, higher resolution and faster frame rate
* a global meteor network camera system like this: https://globalmeteornetwork.org/?page_id=136
* a hydrogen line radio telescope system like this: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/low-cost-hydrogen-line-telescope-using-rtl-sdr/

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Geminid Meteor Shower 2022

Dec15
by kevin on December 15, 2022 at 15:28
Posted In: astronomy

One of the best performances of a meteor show in years!

Mostly because there were no clouds!

For the night of Monday/Tuesday 2022 December 12/13, 39 events were recorded on

https://starlightcascade/allsky2/

> This camera is from the University of Western Ontario Meteor Physics Group and is part of the Southern Ontario Meteor Network, and has been running with at least 4 cameras since 2004 December.
> Today there are 19 active cameras in the system from Collingwood in the north to Kincardine in the west, to the UWO campus in London in the South and now here in Yarker to the east. (Updated: Now the easternmost camera is located at the Canadian Space Agency Headquarters outside of Montreal.)
> This “system 10” was installed and operational on 2012 June 08. Images are 640×480 and are captured from a video feed.

And this is from the night of Tuesday/Wednesday 2022 December 13/14, with 134 events recorded :

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Mars 2022 Dec 09

Dec12
by kevin on December 12, 2022 at 12:05 and modified on December 12, 2022. at 12:08
Posted In: astronomy

It looks like both of us imaged Mars at very near the same time. I did x36 four minute imaging runs from 21:37 to 00:02 EST. exposure was 0.2ms ! wow! Registax has a filename issue when there are decimal points in the name, so I had to work around that.

Two places to identify features:

https://skyandtelescope.org/wp-content/plugins/observing-tools/mars_profiler/mars.html#

https://britastro.org/2022/mars-mapper-updated-for-2022

The BAA one seems to work a little better but cannot invert the image.

In any event, I start on Jupiter Friday evening and then whilst inside the house went to Mars and started, hence the camera also could/should have been rotated a bit to get north up but is off the the right.

The best shot I think is at 04:40 UTC = 11:40 EST, mainly due to altitude, an amazing 58 degrees! It went up as high as 71 degrees but seeing got a little worse.

I skipped the RGB autobalance in registax as it took away wayyyy too much red.

This entire sequence was the best 5%.. not to bad … 42K frames

So this is much like the quicklook at Mars I posted a couple of days ago

And finally, the 36 workable frames turned into an animated .GIF (2MB.. sorry folks!)

Looking forward to Monday evening… will not be able to stay up until midnight then, but at last 21:00 EST methinks. Mars will still get pretty high, and hopefully I will be barlow enabled. I decided to add back in the 90 deg diagonal until such time as the extension tubes arrive. It’s a good diagonal though… dielectric 99% reflectivity. On the downside another optical surface for dust to make spots!

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Jupiter 2022 Dec 09

Dec12
by kevin on December 12, 2022 at 11:58 and modified on December 12, 2022. at 12:10
Posted In: astronomy


The best of Jupiter on Friday evening, just after it went past due south az=180 degrees.

The best 5% of the run with 30K frames… I think I will reprocess the best 10%.. these look a little noisy. I’m using a 400×400 pixel region of interest and autostakkert! embiggens it by 1.5x resulting in a 600×600 pixel image.

Good: altitude, transparency above average, Wind from NNE

Poor: near full moon, seeing

Io and Europa are in this shot, with both going right to left behind the planet. The GRS (is not really so Great!) is *just* coming on the left limb.

The animated .GIF is also attached, 47 frames, and I did move the camera after a first few, trying to make a barlow work. It didn’t

1ms exposures (actually just a little less than that) from 30K frames in a 180 second run.

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RadioJove functions!

Nov29
by kevin on November 29, 2022 at 12:34 and modified on November 29, 2022. at 12:36
Posted In: astronomy

After many weeks of issues with the RadioJove v1 system, we finally got it operational again a few days ago. Some of the recording levels seemed a little low but the audio recordings showed ionospheric probes and normal background noise. The Sun has been quiet of late so there were no flares to look at and compare.

But then we received a note from the RadioJove email list from a fellow Radiojove station in Florida. A double burst was recorded:
Sun Nov. 28, 2022 Millhopper Radio Obs. Gainesville, FL
The first peak was around 17:15:00 UTC and the second burst about 30 seconds later.
So we fired up the RadioSkypipe program, loaded in the days data and started stretching the resulting graph.
We got it!

There was a lot of noise either side of the signal but it is definitely there. This would have been overlooked in the normal review of the data at the graph scales that we use. This bottom graph is ours, SCGO RadioJove.

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asteroid 2022 WJ1 Fireball 2022nov19 082652UTC

Nov22
by kevin on November 22, 2022 at 11:15
Posted In: astronomy

As you may have heard, a newly discovered 1m asteroid crashed into the atmosphere mere hours after discovery.
The UWO Allskycamera network captured it and was able to provide a lot of information (see below). Of note, Camera #10 located in Yarker, also captured the event!

This is the composite image.
Below is the 6 second video (out of a 15 second event) that we captured, just barely over the horizon and through some trees in our SouthWest:

From UWO:
As many of you will know from media reports, asteroid 2022 WJ1 fell right in the middle of the network over the weekend (0326 on Saturday night to be exact). We will be sending out a public call for people to keep an eye out for meteorites as we think some may be on shore near Grimsby (map attached).

https://news.westernu.ca/2022/11/niagara-meteor/

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Linux Fedora 36 to 37 upgrades inplace

Nov17
by kevin on November 17, 2022 at 09:34 and modified on November 17, 2022. at 09:35
Posted In: tech

Linux Fedora 37 was released earlier this week and already we have upgraded three systems. So far so good, no issues with the inplace upgrades.
The command line sequence as root goes like this:

dnf upgrade –refresh
reboot
dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade
dnf system-upgrade download –releasever=37
dnf system-upgrade reboot
dnf system-upgrade clean
dnf clean packages
dnf upgrade
Fedora 37 upgrade complete!
Each took less than 30 minutes.

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2022 Seed Saving -Tomatoes

Nov15
by kim hay on November 15, 2022 at 11:58 and modified on November 15, 2022. at 11:58
Posted In: gardening, Heirloom & Heritage Tomatos, life the universe and everything

The seeds were all dried and put in their packets today. Nine types of tomato seeds were saved out this year.

Anna Russian (mid-large Red), Tiny Tim (red currant) , White Queen (mid White/yellow), Lemon Drop (Yellow cherry)  , Scotia (md red-sweet), Roma (Red- plum med), Large Polish (red- Large) , Pineapple (Large bi-coloured), Napoli Paste (Red mid ).

Issues with Tomatoes in general this year, needs more spacing. Need better and higher staking for the large varieties, such as Kelloggs Breakfast, Pineapple, Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, Southern Nights.

Tiny Tim, is a small bush size, so no staking required. Lemon Drop, needs staking and a tomato cage to hold the stems. Scotia was prolific this year, and so sweet. Higher staking required, as it was very heavy with fruit. All Paste tomatoes, need lots of staking , as they too get heavy.

Stake the plants early, and monitor every couple of days. There was early blight this year, and though the leaves were taken off, the late blight came after the rains in August, and the plants went quickly. All debris was burned.

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Napanee Community Garden 2022

Nov14
by kevin on November 14, 2022 at 11:31 and modified on November 14, 2022. at 11:32
Posted In: napanee food bank garden


This was the 13th year of the Napanee Community Garden for the Local Food Bank.
This is a small group of volunteers who plan, prepare, plant, weed, water, and harvest fresh local produce for the Food Bank in Napanee.
Back when we were younger, we participated in the handson portions of this, but as years went on, we could no longer. Now we tabulate the annual harvest and produce this report: .2022foodbankgarden-AnnualHarvestSummary
A Big Thanks to Susan Withers for the data logging!
A big thanks to all of the volunteers for 2022!

In addition some images from the garden post harvest:


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Jupiter 2022Nov02

Nov04
by kevin on November 4, 2022 at 09:37 and modified on November 4, 2022. at 09:41
Posted In: astronomy

Awesome! A Double Shadow Transit of Jupiter’s moons Wednesday evening.
Below is an animated GIF of approx 45 runs of 180 seconds each, with no delay between each.
Each was approx 30K frames and the best 5% of those were used.

The first frame shows the shadow of the Moon Europa moving from left to right in the southern hemisphere. Europa is the first moon to emerge from the face of Jupiter. Ganymede is the 2nd moon to emerge from the face of Jupiter and it’s shadow appears on the lower left of Jupiter a little later.
The moon Io is seen moving from right to left on the left side of Jupiter.

Five great objects of interest in one evening!
Europa
Europa’s shadow
Ganymede
Ganymede’s Shadow
Io
Jupiter is a little overprocessed, especially some of the darker clouds in the North Equatorial Belt (no, not moon shadows)

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