365 Days of Astronomy
Jan14
In the theme of 365 Days of Astronomy, we made a New Year Resolution to attempt to observe or image every day possible in 2019.
These are the results
This will be updated on an ongoing basis.
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Friday Night imaging
Jan05
A nice night for a change, Friday evening.
Maybe a little hazy (what? why with a forecast of freezing fog?
Took out the old DSLR on a tripod and did a run of 60 second exposures of Orion Rising. Too bad the focus at infinity was not in focus The old display screen is so small and poor that you cannot judge focus at all. So now will have to experiment with moving the lens to focus at infinity and then move it back a “smidge”. Size of smidge to be determined.
Then moved over to the northern skies in the hopes of aurora, but in reality the lens was fogging over and the red cell tower lights were lighting up the lens face, so mostly nothing there.
And the built in battery also was almost dead after an hour in the cold.
So… find a bigger external power source.. work on a dew heater strap.. work on a camera bag (cause the camera was covered in frosties), and experiment with infinity.
Also opened up the Serenity observatory with the Centres 20cm LX200gps. The last session it had a twostar alignment and then was parked. The theory is when you next power it up, it should still be aligned. Told it to go to Betelguese.. ended up 30-50 degrees away. Argh! drove it to Betelguese and sync’d. Then told it to find Polaris. 20-40 degrees away Argh! Drove it to Polaris and sync’d . OK.. lets try Mars!
5-10 degrees away. To be expected I guess with a bad alignment model and only two syncs to attempt to correct it. Methinks Syncs are only to fine tune an existing good alignment model, not build a new model from scratch.
Still commissioning the new ZWO ASI290MC camera.. got it to work with Firecapture and also tried some autoalign and autoguiding with Firecapture. Surprise surprise it worked on the 2nd attempt.
Firecapture autoguides on the actual single camera image you are taking in realtime. It only works on planetary objects, not stars, moon or sun, by using the “centre of mass” of a planetary image on the screen. I left it taking 180 second exposures at 3ms for a total of around 24k frames in a file size of about 18GB.
Went inside the house and brought up chrome remote desktop to see what was going on and saw that it successfully tracked and guided Mars for the entire run!
Also saw that the 120GB SSD drive that started with 90GB free, filled up after only 5 runs and it aborted the rest of the runs.
I have a script to move images off the drive onto the house file server but neglected to start it up. Will have to put that on a win10 scheduled task next time.
Still no progress on adding a wider field finder camera, so that I do not have to crawl inside the observatory, remove the camera, insert an eyepiece and try to get a two star alignment done. That is such a pain! Even with a small 4’x4′ platform that I had thought I overbuilt, when I step inside with my 100kg, the pointing of the scope does in fact move!
This morning (Saturday, astro 2019 day 5/5!) we were out in the freezing fog and haze and caught the ISS pass at 05:26. Very nice!
The rest of the day is trying to remember and adjust the process process for the Mars imagery.
Seeing was poor, transparency was poor. Even with autoalign (the camera capture software move the image around to try and minimize jitter, kind of like image stabilization in cameras and binoculars), and then PIPP to crop and centre the planet, the resulting image still jumps around in 3 dimensions (left-right, up-down, in-out).
At present we are running with autostakkert! v3 to pull out the best 5,10,25,50% of the images and stack them. So far only the 5% looks good. Mars is only 7.2 arcseconds large, which doesn’t help a lot but some surface features are coming out.
When that is all done, all of the original 100GB of avi files will be moved onto an archive drive to free up space and we will start with Registax for wavelet processing.
Too bad Saturday night looks cloudy/flurry like.
Registax v6 was then run to process wavelets to sharpen up the image a bit and then some linux bash scripting to add text annotation. This is one of the end results:
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oh2019 bindings and coils
Dec31
on December 31, 2018
at 15:07
and modified on December 31, 2018. at 15:10
Posted In: life the universe and everything
Greetings this penultimate day!
In any event, we received out RASC Observers Handbook 2019, a backbreaking 352 pages with narrow margins.
As usual, we take it to Staples to get the binding cut, and a spiral coil installed, such that, as displayed in the attached image, one can lay the book flat. Which we often do whilst observing… lay it flat at the page of interest for reference purposes.
We have asked that RASC print a small number with this coil binding but that was rejected.
So we do it ourselves and it used to be around $5 per book. Today it is now over $10. That and the fact that the margins are so narrow, when the binding is cut and the holes punched for the coil, they are so close to the edge that now I have pages coming loose.
Loose pages is a dealbreaker, so this may be the last year for this concept.
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linux fedora grub
Dec19
For many years now, one linux fedora server I maintain had issues with every dnf upgrade that involved a new kernel. It would not place configuration information into boot/grub2/grub.cfg and would not boot into the new kernel. One had to run this command to make it work:
root@S888:/n # grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
Generating grub configuration file …
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.9-300.fc29.i686
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.8-300.fc29.i686
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.6-300.fc29.i686
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.5-300.fc29.i686
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.4-300.fc29.i686
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-0-rescue-25947e2761f2405084e99e0c2a4ea14f
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-0-rescue-25947e2761f2405084e99e0c2a4ea14f.img
device-mapper: reload ioctl on osprober-linux-sda3 failed: Device or resource busy
Command failed.
Even though the command failed, it did work and would reboot on command into the new kernel. The issue seemed to be with /dev/sda3 which is the root directory.
[root@S888 etc]$ cat fstab
# device-spec mount-point fs-type options dump pass
#dump seldom used=0 pass 0=donotcheck 1=1st 2=2nd
/dev/sda1 /boot ext4 defaults 0 1
/dev/sda2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda3 / ext4 defaults 0 1
#sda4 is extended partition
/dev/sda5 /home ext4 defaults 0 2
/dev/sda6 /web ext4 defaults 0 2
#
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/backup ext4 defaults 0 2
I think today we may have fixed this.
root@S888:/etc # os-prober
device-mapper: reload ioctl on osprober-linux-sda3 failed: Device or resource busy
Command failed.
vi /etc/default/grub and add line
GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true
root@S888:/etc/default # grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
Generating grub configuration file …
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.9-300.fc29.i686
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.8-300.fc29.i686
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.6-300.fc29.i686
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.5-300.fc29.i686
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.4-300.fc29.i686
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-0-rescue-25947e2761f2405084e99e0c2a4ea14f
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-0-rescue-25947e2761f2405084e99e0c2a4ea14f.img
done
No errors! Should be fixed!
reboot
It rebooted correctly. The true test will be the next kernel update…
In the meantime we can manually remove some of the older kernels:
root@S888:/boot # dnf remove kernel-core-4.19.4
root@S888:/boot # dnf remove kernel-core-4.19.5
After this, an inspection of grub.cfg shows that these two entries have indeed been removed!
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ISS Pass
Dec17
This is a 15 sec exposure of the International Space Station on Monday evening, 2018 December 10 at 18:44 EST
This was a 71 deg pass overhead, coming from the NNW, moving from down to up.
Aboard is David Saint-Jacques. He is the third Canadian to complete a long-duration mission aboard the Station. He flew to space in December 2018 to spend six and a half months in orbit as a member of Expedition 58.
We tried to image the station while another spacecraft was approaching it to dock, but we have had cloud for months now and this was one of the only opportunities we have had since September.
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Pi backup
Nov28
on November 28, 2018
at 12:01
and modified on December 11, 2018. at 09:26
Posted In: alternative power, tech
MFLASH 5000mAh Rubberized Power Bank – has been added to a raspberry pi as an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). It was on a Black Friday sale for $10, down from $25 and is connected to the Pi that died during our last power events (off, on, off, off, on). It had to be reinstalled from scratch and it would have been fine if the power had not cycled like it did.
It looks like it can simultaneous be charged from the pi power supply and power the pi through its 2.1 amps out port. Both connections are microUSB.
Two weeks later the battery is showing a full charge and the Pi has run continuously without issue.
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fireball
Nov22
A nice bright meteor went through our local skies this morning (Thursday 2018 November 22) at 05:09:38 EST (10:09:38 UTC). If you were outside early this morning you would also be freezing (-18C) but you would have seen a nice sight! The apparent path was starting in our south and ended in our southeast.
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A nice telescopic planetary conjunction coming up in a couple of weeks…
Mars and Neptune on the evening of Thursday 2018 Dec 06.
Mars will set around 23:00 EST in the west, so anytime before that where you have the horizons, I encourage all astronomers to get out and image this.
Mars will be Mag 0.1
Neptune will be Mag 7.9
So even some of you with DSLR and telephoto lens should be able to pick this up!
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weather down.. and up!
Nov19
The Davis Vantage Vue weather station dropped off the air one night, but we didn’t notice until a day or two later. The thing is, it came back up in the daytime. Hmmm.. That sounds like a dead battery and a solar panel picking up the slack.
Haul the stepladder out back to the station, open it up test the battery and lo and behold.. it was lower than 2.7vdc. It is a lithium CR123 battery that is nominally rated at above 3v and when it falls below 2.7v it is considered dead. Bummer. And it was only 10 months old!
Looked back through the records and it looks like we bought two of them back in 2017 December… do you think we could find the other one? Not a chance.
It is not a common battery and it took a few more days to track one down, at a better price of only $5, and then install on Saturday morning.. so we have lost a few days of nighttime weather data but all in all it is not too bad.
We also bought a 2nd battery (good price remember?) and this time it is taped to the internal receiver station! So far … good data day and night!
Note to self in the springtime… lower the station from the top of the existing 8′ 4×4 post to something lower down that does not require a stepladder to access.
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In a recent audit, we came across a linux fedora server that was actually two versions out of date, not just one. Somehow it was missed, or something went wrong the first time.
So this morning we did a double back to back upgrade of linux fedora 27 to 28 and then 28 to 29.
It went flawlessly and quickly. The server had a 120gb ssd drive, which helped a lot for the speediness side of things.
All in all, less than one hour for both upgrades, including approx 1GB download for each of them.
The last plug for SSD drives is an upgrade we did to the SuperSid data logging computer. The 20-40KHz loop antenna is well away from the house and the coax line that runs to the amplifier is maybe 25′. So the data logging computer stays outside in an outbuilding all summer and winter long.. and those extremes of temperature are no conducive to moving parts, like spinning hard drives.
So the Acer Aspire One netbook unit was shut down, brought inside, reconnected to a wired network, and a bare metal disk image was made with the free version of macrium reflect v4. That was about 40 GB, stored on an external USB drive. Its keyboard removed, then the panel removed, allowing access to the SATA hard drive. Two ribbon cables needed to come off, which caused some issues later putting them back. In any event, an old 120GB SSD was installed and the unit reassembled… that took a little time but eventually it was all back together.
The nextstep was to boot from a macreium reflect rescue media, an 8GB USB flash drive and then restore from the external usb drive. After an hour or, the restore was complete. After reboot the system was up and running.
It was reconnected to the Supersid receiver this morning and all seems good to go for the upcoming winter.
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The garlic is finished!
Nov05
The 2018 garlic planting is complete. Still no final numbers but on the order of 85 types and over 1000 cloves planted and covered. The bulbil project is also completed with over 50 bulbils planted and covered. Phew! The relief!
The weather has been worse than in past years, colder, wetter and grosses to be planting outdoors. It was not nearly as enjoyable this year as the last night of planting went well into the darkness with 1-2C temperatures and spitting drizzle.
Cracking the bulbs in advance was a great time saver, indoors vs outdoors.
Garlic in VegBeds 1, 2
Garlic in Vegbeds 1,2,3
Garlic in Vegbed9
Garlic in VegBed10
Garlic bulbils in Vegbed7
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Linux Fedora 29
Oct30
Another six months, another release of Linux Fedora. We are up to version 29 now, and with each version the problems are fewer and the results are faster.
We are updating server class systems today. We start with the least important, least critical server and try the process out on it.
A few commands, a lot of downloads and a reboot, and the first upgrade from Linux Fedora 28 to 29 completed in under 20 minutes.
Granted this machine had a 120GB SSD drive and a gigabit network connection. Still very fast!
But the best part … no issues! All services continued to run, did not break under the strain of the upgrade. That is pure gold.
That went so well, I tried it out on a workstation software version. This one not so good. It’s been 2+ hours and appears to be hung. Granted no SSD drive.
Updated 2018 Nov 01. Two more servers have been successfully upgraded with no issues whatsoever. Awesome!
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