Apollo 11 – two rockets up

Mar21
by kevin on March 21, 2019 at 13:55 and modified on March 21, 2019. at 13:57
Posted In: space


Apollo 11- a documentary with a lot of new archived 70mm footage and what I think were some large format film images that were processed into higher resolution gorgeous final products.. like the lunar panorama.
Highly recommended.. although it may not be in theaters long, as it is a documentary. Will be looking for a bluray release of this for sure.
Impressed by the cameramen of the day and what they thought to cover at the time for use in the future.
Also curious as to the film recovery from the Saturn V second stage that covered the first stage separation along with the spacer ring between 1st and 2nd stages.

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Upgrading an Imac

Mar13
by catz on March 13, 2019 at 14:12 and modified on March 13, 2019. at 14:14
Posted In: tech


This is a tale of upgrading an imac… a 21.5″ late 2015 imac to be precise. We bought it, we used it, it started slowing down.. a lot. various upgrades of OSX and it slowed down even more. It came with 8GB of RAM and is not upgradable at all.
We asked for a quote from a local Mac service company to clone and replace the internal 1TB spinning SATA drive with a smaller 240GB Solid State Drive (SSD). It came back at over $500Can. That was a bit much so we deferred and came up with an alternative. We purchased a Kingston 240GB SSD (about $50Can) and an external USB3 case (about $25Can), installed and ran carbon copy clone on the 1TB to the 240GB and told OSX to boot from the external USB drive going forward.
That worked! The SSD drive, even as an external USB device, still performed noticeably better than the original internal spinning disk (still inside, still spinning, just not used).
After a year or two the Imac started to lock up or crash. The external USB SSD was corrupting. So we took this opportunity to wipe it, run disk utility programs to clean it up, then recloned it, this time with the intention of opening up the imac, removing the 1tb spinning drive and installing the SSD.
The theory was that this would be even faster, being on an internal SATA interface, but also safer, as the external USB method had other issues with cables, motion, coffee cups, etc.
Searching through Youtube, we found a nice little video that said, it’s easy! as long as you have the right tools!
Those tools included a Torx 10 screwdriver, and a couple of plastic wedging tools, one to pry open the display off the case and the other to cut through the double sided adhesive keeping the display attached.
That worked out well and within 20 minutes the new drive was in place and booting up.
Yay! It worked!

Benchmark Times

Internal spinning drive (seconds)
powerup to logo 10
powerup to login 91
powerup to desktop 101

external Solid state drive (seconds)
powerup to logo 8
powerup to login 31
powerup to desktop 34

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Another meteor event 20190309 02:22:23 UTC

Mar09
by catz on March 9, 2019 at 16:52 and modified on March 12, 2019. at 15:34
Posted In: astronomy


Another fireball captured on the Allsky2 camera system, first reported by a local astronomer in a hot tub 🙂
The 4MB video can be seen here.
We captured only the first 4 seconds of the event as it passed beyond the image frame edge.
This was seen by others and reported to the American Meteor Society.
To the lower right is Orion with Betelgeuse and Rigel, Sirius, and moving upward Procyon, Pollux and Castor.

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Sky Anomaly

Mar08
by catz on March 8, 2019 at 12:44 and modified on March 9, 2019. at 16:49
Posted In: astronomy

Greetings… this is an interesting one.

A sky anomaly went overhead last night (Thursday 2019 March 7th) at 23:38:30 UTC, 18:38:30 EST

overhead towards the north.

A link to the13 second long video is at:

https://starlightcascade.ca/allsky2/video/ev_20190307_233830A_10A.mp4

The dimmer object travelling west to east is an aircraft, 777 from toronto to cairo at 31000 feet doing 515 knots.

Not the ISS, no heavens-above satellites in that time frame, no other aircraft on flightradar24.com, no reports on the AMS site.

In addition, not a standard meteor that starts dim, brightens up then fades.
Upon closer inspection, the starting point looks like it might be two objects.

Any other observers? any thoughts as to what else it might be?

Updated: The consensus has turned this event into an aircraft from the local Kingston airport. The two seperated point sources while overhead and then merging into one as the distance increased was a good argument. No strobe light, but apparently those are not always on or may have been blocked by line of sight.

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8 second meteor 2019 March 01

Mar04
by catz on March 4, 2019 at 11:55 and modified on March 12, 2019. at 15:28
Posted In: astronomy

Upon reviewing and discovering bugs in the last weeks worth of Allsky2 camera code, I processed it manually and came across this nice 8 second meteor on the morning of Friday 2019 March 01, 09:34:32 UTC or -5 hours for 04:34:32 EST
The 8 second video is here.

This came from the West South West and ended in the North North East.
I haven’t come across any other reports as of yet, so posting it here, in case it shakes loose some new reports.

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SSD upgrade

Feb07
by catz on February 7, 2019 at 09:28 and modified on February 7, 2019. at 09:33
Posted In: tech

Wow. This is for any imagers in particular out there, with a desktop of laptop computer with a spinning hard drive.
Replace it with a Solid State Drive (SSD). Now! The prices have dropped in half in the last 8 months.

Many laptops these days are coming with a 120GB SSD but if you image at all, you know that it can and will fill up quickly. I routinely fill up the unused 80GB in the space of an hour or two. Last May (2018) we upgraded Kims laptop from a 120GB to a 480 GB for $184Can
This was a Kingston Digital 480GB UV400 SSD C2C 2.5″

Today I just received one for my laptop, a Kingston Digital A400 SSD 480GB SATA 3 2.5”, not exactly the same model as above but certainly good enough… for only $75Can, both through amazon.ca Wow! Again, a huge price drop in less than 9 months.

You will benefit from this:
Much faster read/write response! Less heat generated inside the laptop. Better timetofailure. Faster startup! Faster program load. Faster data save. More impact resistance (either dropping on ground or pounding on in frustration). Better laptop battery life. Less susceptible to extremes of hot or cold (like out in an observatory).
Absolutely recommended!

I ran through the upgrade process last night and was done in about 90 minutes.
My first method failed, using macrium reflect to make a disk image stored on a network file server, then booting from a macrium reflect recvoery cd and restoring the image… the software was too old and could not see the drive image.

Working process:
1. Clean laptop Drive to free up more space; remove restore points, and have less to clone.
2. Shut down, remove 120GB drive, install 480GB drive.
3. Connected 120GB SSD to an external USB3 enclosure, and booted a clonezilla cdrom.
Cloned the 120gb to 480gb in about 1.5 hours. Disconnected the external 120gb SSD and test reboot the new drive. OK! A couple of reboots by windows later and it was up and running and showing a 110GB partition.
Now lets try to extend the 100GB partition, failed. The Windows recovery partition is in the way, and Windows would not delete it.
OK. Run aomei partition manager software, delete last two partitions. Worked! Then extend main c: drive partition into the rest of the drive.
Reboot. Works! Now showing 446GB with 369GB free!

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Snowbound

Jan30
by catz on January 30, 2019 at 16:21 and modified on January 30, 2019. at 16:29
Posted In: life the universe and everything, weather


What do we do when stuck inside for the winter? Revisit some classic video.

  • We started with the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition Trilogy, which took a little over 14 hours. It was great! Have to wait a bit before trying that much again for the Hobbit, in three parts!
  • Next was the one and only season of what could have gone on for many season, Firefly with Nathan Filion.
  • We dove into the Doctor Who spinoff series called Torchwood, with John Barrowman and Eve Myles. It was a little uneven, and very dark at times, but we powered through four seasons of that!
  • The latest series is something with one of our fave actors, Jason Momoa (Game of Thrones, Stargate Atlantis), called Frontier. A great historic drama about the founding days of Canada, the Hudson Bay Company and the Fur Trade. We have gone through the first two seasons and have just started the third and last (so far) season.

    There are still some old series that we have not yet seen but will schedule for the next blizzard… Breaking Bad, Lost and a few others. Competing with that are two that we have seen before but is time to watch again, namely Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica.

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    Linux Fedora 29

    Jan30
    by catz on January 30, 2019 at 14:41 and modified on January 30, 2019. at 14:42
    Posted In: tech

    This website has been running on linux fedora forever… at least 15 years if not more. Back in the day we started with 32 bit linux, as that is all we had. Over the years, the hardware has been changed out, failed, upgraded, etc. Here in 2019, the hardware is much newer 64 bit CPU architecture but still only running a 32 bit operating system. This had a number of drawbacks, like only being able to see 3GB of RAM and not the 6GB on the system.
    Three weeks ago, the issue became critical as new updates to Fedora 29 caused the system to become unstable, manifested by resource allocation issues and crashes and lockups.
    So yesterday, we took the plunge… wiped the drive and reinstalled a fresh copy of fedora 29 server 64 bit. It’s taken until now to get most everything back up and running, the hardest part being the mysql database and its interface to wordpress.
    So far so good!
    The system is stable again, showing none of the issues and failures of the last three weeks.
    Let’s hope for clear sailing ahead!

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    video finder

    Jan28
    by catz on January 28, 2019 at 09:18 and modified on January 28, 2019. at 09:24
    Posted In: astronomy

    We’ve recently taken these two items and put them together to create a usb digital webcam finder, as opposed to the traditional video camera with an Analog to Digital converter and software to run it as well. The intent here is to allow the telescope to find objects better and faster when it is not pointing well. This mostly will be when hunting for stars to do a two star alignment, but also for more mobile objects like planets 🙂

    Just waiting for the blizzards to die down, get some warmer temperatures and it can be mounted and tested.

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    L&A Hort met this week

    Jan18
    by catz on January 18, 2019 at 10:22 and modified on January 18, 2019. at 10:23
    Posted In: gardening


    The Lennox and Addington Horticultural Society met this week, on Wednesday, 2019 January 16th 7pm at our new location for the year: – Meeting, the Morning Star Mission, 59 Water St., Napanee.
    Guest Speaker – Dr. Allan Good “GMO”

    He gave an hour long talk on Genetically Modified Organisms, and their history over the last few decades.

    The next meeting will be on Wednesday February 20th, 7:00pm, at the Morning Star Mission, Napanee
    Guest Speaker: Alice Smith – Paint Your Garden “The Poppy”

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    365 Days of Astronomy

    Jan14
    by catz on January 14, 2019 at 11:26 and modified on January 14, 2019. at 18:51
    Posted In: astronomy

    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
    by catz on January 5, 2019 at 15:00 and modified on January 5, 2019. at 15:06
    Posted In: astronomy

    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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