Aurora! Big storm! Lots of cloud.
This is from the google pixel 6a smartphone on a tripod… nightsight 4 minute exposure, 7MB.
And this is from the SCGO Allsky1pi camera system, 9MB:
This is actually our first shelf
A second pass of the master index vs what is on the shelves was completed. Duplicates have been removed and we are sitting around 960 books to date. There are more around the house that have not yet been entered, but they are small in number (I hope!). Because we have basically filled up all of the shelves on 6 bookcases.
And now… time to start reading them all.
After twenty years of knowing it needed to me done, and about 3 months of doing, and about 2 days of intensive time dedicated to it, we have completed the first pass at indexing, shelving and sorting the SCGO Science Library.
These are 1007 (at the moment) books ranging in all sciences and age that are mostly about astronomy and space, with a few others thrown in just to make it a bit eclectic.
The next step is to make another pass to ensue the alphabetization is as good as it will get, while also removing duplicates.
Removing dupes will be harder than it seems… do you keep the first edition or the 2nd edition? Do you keep the softcover or the hardcover? What if you have 6 copies (1st ed, 2nd ed, etc) ?
We will see.
What else can one do whilst outside in PJ’s? Take images of other stuff too!
This is M31, almost directly overhead, looking through our maple tree branches illuminated by the red LED lighting in the nearby observatory.
As before, a tripod, Canon T7I DSLR, manually focus, manual shutter trigger, 10 sec at ISO12800.
Again there are a series of them that I can try and stack later along with the darks.
High cloud was coming in, transparency was average or below, seeing was average, no moon.
I think I am behind the lot of you, in that last night was my first look at Comet C/2022 E3 (ztf).
Kim was also out using the 20cm dobsonian telescope and let me take a peek. Hmmp.. small faint fuzzy.
My Mark I eyeballs just aint what they used to be.
So I brought out a tripod, the Canon T7I DSLR and the stock 75-300mm zoom lens, manually focussed, manually triggered the shutter and took a series of 10 sec exposures at ISO 12800.
This attached image is one of the last one I took as I was getting cold, outside, in pajamas 😄
That’s the Hyades and Aldebaran near the centre and a green fuzzy off to its left. The lens was at about 105mm and NO tracking remember!
I also took a series of darks and hope to try various deep sky stacking and processing software this week, just to see what the heck the rest of you are doing!
Jupiter was low (airmass was 2.55 !!!), seeing was average, transparency was poor. This was the best 10% of 15K frames at 5ms per frame.
First time out in a month and boy was it cold… not as cold as before but still brrrrr!
This is the 3rd imaging session of 2023. Sunday evening.. could not stay up for long. Attempted to find Mars and after 10 minutes of searching, slewing, resetting, etc. no joy.
Really really looking forward to a newer bigger camera someday that has a bigger FOV… then I might be able to find my target better!
Then again maybe this ZWO ASIAir may be another possibility.. Only issue is, can the ASI 290MC camera image stars in order for plate solving to take a stab at pointing and aligning?
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!
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.
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/
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 :
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!
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.
(not our library shelves)