midsummer pause

Aug03
by catz on August 3, 2018 at 09:28 and modified on August 3, 2018. at 09:30
Posted In: gardening, life the universe and everything

It’s the middle of the summer. The garlic harvest is complete and is hanging to dry. That lets us turn our attention to other projects. We have started building a new observatory, much further away from the house and the tall ash trees and sugar maple trees. That project may be done next week.
This wordpress instance was updated this morning.. that went very smoothly.
The garlic plot has been tilled over twice, to get rid of grass and weeds, and now we are thinking of putting in a cover crop, probably winter wheat, for cutting down in the late fall.

Also it is time to stock up on composted sheep manure. We don’t need it right now, but when we do need it, it is not available.
TSC (the old Co-op) was selling 13kg bags at $3.50 each Wednesday. They are listed as 0.6, 0.3, 0.3, which is quite different than in past years of 0.5, 0.5, 0.5 (Nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium). Other regular suppliers in the past have been Canadian Tire and Lowes.

On the tomato front, we have no captured five tomato hornworms over three days. So far so good. Inspection once or twice a day seems to be keeping them in check.

The drought was last month and we have had enough rain in the last week or two that the grass has started to grow again and will require a cutting. It’s been 6-8 weeks since the last time.

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Garlic Harvest complete – 5 days

Jul30
by catz on July 30, 2018 at 08:54 and modified on July 30, 2018. at 09:01
Posted In: garlic


The Great SCGO Garlic Harvest of 2018 has completed.
Five days/sessions of harvest over a week:
Sun 2018 July 22 – 3 hours
Mon 2018 July 23 – 1.5 hours
Wed 2018 July 25 – 1 hour
Thu 2018 July 26 – 1 hour
Sun 2018 July 29 – 3 hours
Just under 10 hours to harvest around 800 plants.

This includes washing, cleaning, labelling and hanging on five drying racks as seen above. They are inside a leanto structure that is screened but otherwise open to the airflow on the eastern and western ends.

It also includes harvesting the plants from the bulbil project, approx 24ft^2 of another 50+ bulbils being grown into fullsize garlic over the course of a few years.

Less than 5%, probably closer to 1-2% of the garlic did not make it. Will no more once we transcribe the records from outside. leak moth damage to bulbs looks pretty good so far as well, but again we will know more later. After drying/curing for 2-4 weeks, the will come come down out of the racks, stalks will be cut off, roots trimmer and then the batch will be measured and weighed. Then seed is selected and put into a paper bag and then the remainder of the garlic type and the seed bag go into another labelled bag and stored in the coldroom.
Planting will be in late October/early November this year and we are starting to look around to see where we have 400-500ft^2 elsewhere for crop rotation.

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It’s a Beautiful Day!

Jul26
by catz on July 26, 2018 at 09:34 and modified on July 26, 2018. at 09:35
Posted In: life the universe and everything

A month of drought, heat waves, cracked soil, dead grass, dead plants and finally we have 4 days of slow rain.

69mm to be exact. And it is awesome! Plants doing better, nights are cooler, windows are open and the house is cooling down. The garlic harvest is on hold however… new estimate is late Sunday to complete (4 days from now).

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Garlic Harvest Day 3

Jul24
by catz on July 24, 2018 at 13:24 and modified on July 24, 2018. at 13:35
Posted In: gardening, garlic


Day three of the SCGO 2018 Garlic Harvest. Another 90 minutes in the gardens, another 136 plants harvested. For the first time, the new washing table was put to use.
Easier on the back with less bending over, but still the water splash completely soaks your front.
Still, better than before.

Construction details:
The tabletop was built from 1×4″ wood, 21″deep and 48″ wide. It was glued and screwed together. Hardware metal mesh with 1/2″ grids were installed on top with a little extra (24″x50″) bent over the edges. with the corners cut to allow the bending. It was stapled and nailed (1″ roofing nails) on.
After that, a suitable work height was determined to be 36″, so 2×4″ legs were cut to 36″ and mounted on the inside of the tabletop. Glued and screwed in gives a relatively stable surface to work on.
A cloth was added as a skirt to stop the spray from soaking ones legs and a 2×2 post was added on one edge to help support the hose.
All of the material except the hardware mesh were leftover items and were reused for this project.

Testing revealed the hose still needed to be handheld as it was not directed at the correct area for washing. Still working on that feature upgrade.

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Tomato progress

Jul23
by catz on July 23, 2018 at 08:35
Posted In: gardening, Heirloom & Heritage Tomatos


This is part of our heirloom tomato patch. Each plant is staked, velcroed for support and labelled with a laminated nametag. We top up our soil each year and this year’s was just a little weed infested. The foreground is the result of an hours worth of weeding, the background is the total ground cover of weed. Ick! So far so good, no tomato hornworms at all. The drought has been bad. The 2nd image shows the last month of rainfall at our weather station. 10mm for July and maybe 25 for the last 30 days, with two to three weeks of heat wave temperatures. Surprisingly the tomatos are doing not too bad. They are being watered every other day in the early morning or late evening. The ground is totally dry the next day. There are some flowers coming up, some pollinators in the area, so we hope for a slightly subpar normal harvest this year.

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garlic harvest 2018

Jul23
by catz on July 23, 2018 at 08:27
Posted In: garlic, life the universe and everything

Sunday 2018 July 22nd, the 2nd day of garlic harvest. Saturday was about 3 hours of harvesting just under 200 plants. Sunday was only about 1 hour for just under 100 plants.
They were hand brushed off to get the very hard dirt out of the root and bulb surface, then rinsed in water and finally tagged with a cargo tag with their type and number and hung up to dry in a shaded open air leanto for 2-4 weeks.
We plant a minimum of 6 cloves of each type with 12, 18 or even 60 of types we like. Their were over 80 types this year and we hope to be finished the harvest in another 6 days or so. A new feature, as yet untested is a washing station table, basically a 2’x4′ box with hardware metal mesh over the surface on a stand 36″ off the ground. We will try this out the next harvest session.

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Bright meteor 20180629 01:24:58 EDT

Jul05
by catz on July 5, 2018 at 08:05
Posted In: astronomy

Reviewing the nightly allsky2 images of bright meteors, we came across this *nice* meteor at 05:24 UTC or 01:24 EDT.

Needless to say, we were not awake to see this but perhaps some of you were.

This was about a 3 second event from overhead (north is up) moving east to west

The two bright objects near the eastern end may be Jupiter on the bottom and Arcturus on the top.

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power rankings

Jul04
by catz on July 4, 2018 at 08:48
Posted In: life the universe and everything

Interesting analysis summary. Unsure of the detailed parameters but it looks pretty in the end.

The only good news is: being at the bottom means you can only go up 🙂
Wow.
How many weeks on the bottom before we get a better coach?
How many weeks on the bottom before we try to get some of our better players back.. oh wait.. many have now retired out of frustration.

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seti@home

Jun21
by catz on June 21, 2018 at 10:08 and modified on June 21, 2018. at 10:12
Posted In: astronomy, life the universe and everything, tech


I first joined the distributed computer project SETI@Home back on 1999 April 12th. That means early next year will be 20 years. Wow. Very few things survey for 20 years on the Internet.
Kim as well joined up in 1999, on August 13th.
We will have to celebrate in some fashion, involving the movies “Paul” and “Alien” and “Contact”.

It is the first day of summer, and as much as we have liked to install a small scale Stonehenge in the backyard, there are just a few too many trees in the way to get any chance of the sunlight making its way over the horizon onto our stones to work.


We have completed the weeding and grass pulling of all but three flower beds here at SCGO, and hope to have them done this weekend. It is always a race between weeding and running out of energy and motivation and letting the grass and weeds take over the flower beds.

There are a few summer projects left as well… renovating the leanto, adding some insulation to the greenhouse for those first few weeks early next spring, and building a new imaging observatory away from all of the tall trees that seem to have overtaken most of the sky at the existing site. Speaking of which, the new roof has survived some pretty strong storms already since it was completed back in May. Some Good News!

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Radiojove vs lightning

Jun14
by catz on June 14, 2018 at 10:29 and modified on June 14, 2018. at 10:29
Posted In: astronomy, weather

This is the affect of the thunderstorm/lightning storm that rolled through our area last night… less than an hour overhead directly, but the Radiojove radio telescope system was picking up strikes for 2 hours or so.

16:00-16:30 EDT


Before the storm

18:00-18:30 EDT


During the storm

19:00-19:30 EDT


After the storm

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Supersid anomaly

Jun11
by catz on June 11, 2018 at 14:40 and modified on June 11, 2018. at 14:54
Posted In: astronomy


This is a screen capture of the Supersid v1.2.2 software capturing the Supersid receiver data. We’ve started to notice that overtime the plotted graph shrinks down to almost no signal. Going back to the raw data displayed on the capture software we see this: signals moving into the negative range.
A simple software shutdown restart fixes it, as shown here:

The data looks pretty much identical but the Y axis has corrected.
One issue with restarting the software is that you basically lose the data for the day, as it only saves out every 24 hours. So we’ve lost the current day and will also lose the rest of today.

Actively looking for software updates (but can’t find any), or perhaps start thinking about rebooting the system every x days, just after 00:00 UT.
The antenna is a wirewound 24turn 2m diameter loop with the plan of the antenna NorthSouth, aimed at NAA in Maine, almost directly East. This was operational in 2016 January, replacing an older SID system.

The source code is not available to us and the data that we get out is a text .csv file that looks like this:
# Site = SCGO
# Contact =
# Country = CA
# Longitude = -76
# Latitude = 44
#
# UTC_Offset = -00.00
# TimeZone = EST
#
# UTC_StartTime = 2018-06-10 00:00:00
# LogInterval = 5
# LogType = filtered
# MonitorID =
# SampleRate = 5
# StationID = NAA
# Frequency = 24000
2018-06-10 00:00:00, 1.01886472755
2018-06-10 00:00:05, 1.01257096078
2018-06-10 00:00:10, 1.00627719401
2018-06-10 00:00:15, 0.999983427235
2018-06-10 00:00:20, 0.993689660464
2018-06-10 00:00:25, 0.987395893692

I think it would help to also create a page of the last weeks worth of images, for a quicker at-a-glance how is it going?
SCGO_NAA-20180610.png
SCGO_NAA-20180609.png
SCGO_NAA-20180608.png
SCGO_NAA-20180607.png
SCGO_NAA-20180606.png
SCGO_NAA-20180605.png
SCGO_NAA-20180604.png

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ISS transit of the Sun 2018June02

Jun04
by catz on June 4, 2018 at 10:15
Posted In: astronomy

On Saturday 2018 June 2nd, we drove over to the Venus transit site south of Newburgh (staying on the public road part and not trespassing) to observe and image the transit of the Sun by the International Space Station. Neither of us have witnessed this event before and it is on both of our observing bucket lists.

She was using her regular Solar scope, a Bausch & Lomb 4000 SC, fl=1200mm and an eyepiece, and a thousand oaks glass solar filter.

I was using the Meade LXD55 mount, Meade DS90 refractor (fl=800mm), the ZWO ASI120MC camera with a 0.5 focal reducer, a windows 10 laptop with firecapture2.6.0.8 , and a baader film solar filter.

The event was set for 20:03:52 from transit-finder.com. We arrived about 15 minutes early, turned on cell data and the atomic clock app to get hopefully sync’d time and started to setup. Last time I used my setup was last August in Wyoming… and I was short a critical part to mount the solar filter.

Kim found some scotch tape and we quickly attached the filter and crossed some finger that it would stay put.

The venus transit site has the only good NW horizon that we know of. The Yarker baseball diamond has a good SE horizon but with some local trees often in the way (had to climb on top of the minivan last time to get a clear shot).

I started the video .avi recording approx 30 seconds before the event.. good thing too as the event seemed to occur 3-5 seconds before prediction. could have been the cell phone time as well.. we forgot to bring the *real* shortware atomic clock.

The other issue with imaging… even with 800mm and a 0.5x focal reducer, the entire disk of the sun did not fit into the Field of View. There was a sunspot, 2712 on the disk, so I focussed on that. The ISS track had been shifting southward over the last few weeks and to get a centreline pass we would have been close to Napanee.. but with no good horizon.

So.. it would be a shorter chord pass but where on the sun? I took a guess and guessed wrong. It did get imaged at multiple FPS but on the top edge of the screen. I think we might have missed 1st contact and 2nd contact but have the middle bits.

The event was *fast*. 3 seconds still.. as it was far away and the apparent motion is fairly slow, compared to an overhead pass.

The video captured was 1280×960 pixels (full resolution) and the 22 seconds captured came in at 1400MB. I used the software AVI-trimmer to cut out the first and last segments and it came in at 400MB for about 6 seconds. The exposure was around 0.3ms /frame.

Then Handbrake to downsize and compress it into just under 2MB.

I want to break out each individual frame next and put them back together in various ways, perhaps blown up a bit as well.

So.. the first video produced is 1.8Mb large, is 1052×720 resolution at 18 FPS and is 7 seconds long or 126 frames.

It can be seen at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/125182848@N03/27689952367/

for now and on starlightcascade.ca a little later.

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