opposition 2020

Jan20
by catz on January 20, 2020 at 10:45 and modified on January 20, 2020. at 11:36
Posted In: astronomy


This image shows Mars at 7.2 arcseconds in diameter and a declination of +0deg 52 min and an altitude of 22 deg, and using 3ms exposures.
Following up on the 20 tips below, in particular Tip #3:

mark these on whatever method you use to remind you of upcoming events.

* 2020 opposition dates

July 14 – Jupiter
July 20 – Saturn
September 11 Neptune
October 13 – Mars
October 31 – Uranus

Of note Mars will be much higher in altitude for the 2020 opposition vs the last 2018 one:
2018 July 27 Dec -25°.4
2020 October 13 Dec +5°.5
The three oppositions after that are even higher in declination!

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advice from down under

Jan20
by catz on January 20, 2020 at 10:42
Posted In: astronomy

60cm Venor dobsonian telescope

We were wondering through youtube this morning and came across some nice videos of an Australian astronomer Dylan O’Donnell.

This one was particularly nice:

We use some of the software he mentions are are almost in complete agreement with his 20 tips.
In summary the 20 tips are:

1) Get a Big F(*&^@#$ Telescope

2) Use barlows/Powermates

3) Wait for Opposition

4) Get High

5) Seeing

6) Firecapture and Autoalign

7) Get Lucky

8) Region of Interest

9) Use a monochrome camera

10) Autorun RGB sequences

11) Good initial levels

12) collimation

13) Focus on a star

14) Drizzle with autostakkert!2

15) Lucky Lucky Imaging

16) Luminance

17) Auto colour balance

18) topaz denoise

19) sharpening

20) advanced: derotation

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L&A Hort Met This Week

Jan16
by catz on January 16, 2020 at 09:48
Posted In: gardening

The Lennox and Addington Horticultural Society met this week, on Wednesday, 2020 January 15th 7pm at the Morning Star Mission, 59 Water St., Napanee.
15 members and guests were in attendance. The meeting adjourned at 8:15pm

The next meeting will be on Wednesday 2020 February 19th, 7:00pm, at A NEW LOCATION: St. Patricks Church, 179 West St, Napanee. Ample free parking across the street, meeting room in the new addition.

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Betelgeuse

Jan12
by catz on January 12, 2020 at 12:47 and modified on January 15, 2020. at 11:02
Posted In: astronomy


This is the red supergiant star Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion.
The image on the left is from 2019 October 23 and the image on the right from 2019 December 28, 67 days apart.
Both are 15 second exposures but on different cameras, on the left a Canon Powershot ELPH 120 with ISO 800 and on the right a Canon 300D with ISO 1600.
Ideally one would want to use the same camera, the same object framing, same ISO and same exposures to compare, but even so, the difference in brightness stands out.
Betelgeuse has dimmed significantly in the last few months.
One can also go to the AAVSO website and generate a light curve, as I have done here below, showing brightness numbers from October 23 to Jan 12

Without numerical analysis, just looking at the curve shows a change from about magnitudes 0.5 to 1.5

You can go here to generate your own light curve to keep track of the star.

https://www.aavso.org/apps/webobs/results/?star=BETELGEUSE
or
https://www.aavso.org/LCGv2/

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Allskypi pathfinder project

Jan12
by catz on January 12, 2020 at 11:44
Posted In: astronomy

Our v2 allsky camera was an SBIG ST237A camera and was operational from 2006Dec-2018July. Ever since then we have been toying around with building another system out of existing spare parts and instead of a desktop, laptop or netbook data logging computer, a Raspberry Pi instead.
This pathfinder project was essentially an R&D project to get an operational camera system up and running, write it up and then see if others would like to go ahead and build some as well.
Luckily someone else thought of this first and posted the imeptus for us to follow at: https://www.instructables.com/id/Wireless-All-Sky-Camera/
This project uses a ZWO ASI120MC or equivalent camera, with included wide angle lens, housing and raspberry pi code.
The SCGO system has been mounted and operational since 2019 Dec 03 and work continues on commissioning it. This includes developing a dome heating system as it often condenses and or frosts up and accumulated snow does not normally melt off; programming to create archives, aiming of the housing to include more northern horizon for aurora capture; and more.
Total cost is expected to be under $300Can with most of that being the camera.
To date the system has been very robust with the raspberry pi having an uptime of 12 days since last restart.

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Asteroid Bennu – mapping

Dec23
by catz on December 23, 2019 at 14:37
Posted In: astronomy, space, tech


This image shows sample site Nightingale, OSIRIS-REx’s primary sample collection site on asteroid Bennu. The image is overlaid with a graphic of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to illustrate the scale of the site. Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona.

Over the course of 91 days this year, we mapped this rock collection of rocks, for the end purpose of selecting a safe landing site for the spacecraft.
In the end, we also mapped (along with 14? others) the primary landing site “Nightingale”.

From https://www.psi.edu/news/bennusite
When NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission spacecraft arrived at the asteroid Bennu, it discovered more rocks and boulders than envisioned. Mapping all these potential hazards was necessary to select a location to collect a sample of the surface for return to Earth. This effort was the work of multiple teams around the globe. One of those teams consisted of more than 3,500 citizen scientists who used CosmoQuest’s Bennu Mappers project to mark rocks, measure boulders, and map craters. Together, they made more than 14 million annotations of features on a global map of Bennu. CosmoQuest is a project that is based at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz. (CosmoQuest.org).

These volunteers had no way of knowing in advance if the sites they studied and mapped would be the one selected as the final sampling site for the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Folks who saw images with fewer rocks could hope “This is it!” But first, they had to first mark all the photos with hundreds of rocks and dozens of boulders so mission scientists could choose the images critical to site selection.

“It is amazing that more than 3,500 citizen scientists participated in CosmoQuest’s project to map Bennu and help mission scientists find the best place for OSIRIS-REx to collect a sample,” said Pamela L. Gay, Senior Scientist and Senior Education and Communication Specialist at PSI. “This kind of a volunteer effort makes it easier to find safe places to sample and scientifically interesting places to explore.”

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The Expanse – Season 4

Dec16
by catz on December 16, 2019 at 09:05
Posted In: Science Fiction


Season 4 of The Expanse, a television series based on the works of James S. A. Corey (the pen name used by collaborators Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) released all 10 episodes last week and we made the time to watch it over two evenings.
Although we still have discussions about binge-watching vs weekly released, it was still great to watch the 10 episodes without forgetting plotlines, characters and who was in danger with what when.
Highly recommended. If you have read the book first, it helps set the tv season and keep the characters familiar.

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acurite weather station

Dec11
by catz on December 11, 2019 at 08:56 and modified on December 13, 2019. at 09:13
Posted In: tech, weather


It’s been over a week now since the new weather station (Acurite Pro model 06004) went operational in the back gardens. There have been signal dropouts and there has been cold temperatures (-20C), so we assumed it was the cold weather affecting the 4AA alkaline batteries powering the transmitter.
They were replaced 3 days ago with 4AA lithium batteries, rated for -40C.
And we still had signal dropouts!
So last night the receiver/display was moved from the front of the house to the rear of the house, closer to the transmitter, with fewer walls to penetrate, and with fewer sources of RFI between the transmitter and receiver.
The signal immediately jumped to 100% and has been solid for 12 hours now.

The issue is, we had 100% signal a *lot* when the station first went in.. and it got progressively worse and more intermittent over time.
Hopefully not a weather station failure in progress..
Only time will tell.

Updated 2019Dec13 – two days later the signal strength has remained strong and mostly consistent… just a few blips here and there of signal drop.

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Pi Projects update

Dec05
by catz on December 5, 2019 at 12:26 and modified on December 5, 2019. at 12:36
Posted In: tech

The weatherpi (3B model) data logger for the Acurite Pro Weather Station has been operational now for over 5 days straight, with the weather sensor out in the back vegetable garden. Everything is working fine and nicely correlates with the remote thermometer at the front of the house.

The oldest pi (model 1b) has failed at the simplest of tasks we wanted, running a 55″ display with web browser contents.. it just could not keep up. So it has been permanently retired.

The 2nd oldest (model 2b) is running the display and can even play music at the same time.

The next project in development is the wireless allsky camera, as seen here:
https://www.instructables.com/id/Wireless-All-Sky-Camera/

Installing raspbian “buster” with desktop went in fairly well on an 8GB microSD card, but because we would be storing imagery onboard for some unknown amount of time (we ran it for one night and found 2600+ images at 300K each totalling 770MB for the one night), we upgraded to a 16GB microSD card.

We hope to move images off the raspberry pi microSD card on a regular, automated process, but sometimes life happens and it does not work out as planned 🙂

This is a pathfinder project for the local astronomy club. Once operational, a detailed project plan will be written up with parts, supplies, sources, software and instructions… and then we will go from there.
The software install and initial configuration is complete.. now we turn our attention to the camera housing.

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pi pi everywhere a pi

Nov29
by catz on November 29, 2019 at 11:12 and modified on December 5, 2019. at 12:37
Posted In: tech

raspberry pi


We recently did an inventory of all of the Raspberry Pi computers we had kicking about:

1x pi1b 2014ish 1 core 700 MHz, 512MB, 2xUSB2, ethernet, hdmi
1x pi2b 2016ish 4 core 900 MHz, 1GB, 4xusb2, ethernet, hdmi
3x pi3b 2017ish 4 core 1200 MHz, 1GB, 4xusb2, ethernet, hdmi, wifi 802.11n

The oldest pi1b we had used as a command line interface datalogging from a davis vantage vue weatherstation, since 2014. Then the weather station died. I wanted to try and see if this would drive a 55″ display running in a lobby, putting out a dynamic website with the chromium web browser *and* using xrdp, use windows remote desktop protocol to command and control it remotely.

One step at a time. Downloaded and installed the latest Raspian OS, “Buster” and used “Balena Ethcher” to flash the biggest graphical version with software onto an 8GB microSD card with SD adapter. That took a couple of hours but did in fact worked.

The Pi came up, repartitioned itself, came up again into a nice graphical desktop. Opening up a terminal we did a “sudo apt-get update” then a “sudo apt-get upgrade” then a “sudo apt-get install xrdp”.
A little bit of research showed how to start up the built in chromium web browser automatically, and in kiosk mode:
sudo nano /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart”
Add the following line:
/usr/bin/chromium –kiosk –disable-restore-session-state
also, start up the web browser, go to the website we wanted, and added that into the startup settings as the initial home page to open up.
Rebooted and it all worked!
Now mind you, displaying on a 1080p display was a little slow, but the functionality was there.
Attempting to remote desktop from a windows machine did also in fact work… but very slowly. On the order of a minute and the background wallpaper appeared. another minute and the web browser appeared.
It was unmanageable.

So the moral of this story … old tech is in fact a little too slow for some things. So we will shelve this model pi and try the next one up… the Pi2B with 4 CPU cores instead of 1 core, 900 MHz clock speed instead of 700MHz, and more RAM.
We should be able to remove the microSD card and transfer it across to the new Pi… will find out tomorrow!

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Early Christmas

Nov26
by catz on November 26, 2019 at 15:24 and modified on November 26, 2019. at 15:29
Posted In: tech, weather


After many months of being without a weather station, we finally found one that should work for us.
This is an Acurite Pro (model number yet to be determined). It has arrived, been assembled, and is waiting to go outdoors and then to be connected to a data logging computer. We will try and use the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B that we used in the past with Wee-wx software and see what happens.
It will be mounted out back in the vegetable beds, about 2m off the ground. We are more concerned with ground temperatures where we work and play, and the veg grow, then we are about “more accurate” wind speed readings by being 10m in the air. In addition, this station does not log wind gusts, only regular wind speed.

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Garlic to bed

Nov14
by catz on November 14, 2019 at 15:18 and modified on November 14, 2019. at 15:19
Posted In: gardening, garlic


The 847 garlic cloves of 99 varieties in 142 rows are nicely to bed and sleeping under a coat of straw and snow.
Hopefully all will survive and grow to be Big Big bulbs next year!
They had a *lot* of composted manure this time around to help out and we will be adding in irrigation in the spring.

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