First Light – allsky1pi new lens

May12
by catz on May 12, 2021 at 13:46 and modified on May 12, 2021. at 13:50
Posted In: astronomy


This is the First Light image from the new wider angle lens for the allsky1pi camera system.
The old lens came along with the ASI ZWO120MC camera and was a 2.1mm focal length.
This new lens is a 1.55mm focal length and as seen in this image, does come to focus (our biggest concern) and also shows more of the sky. Focus is not perfect at the moment, but the fact that it can come close means it can get even better!
The camera is still mounted biased towards the north, as one of its primary goals is to image aurora, often low in altitude to our north. North is up, East is left, West is right. Not all of the southern horizon is showing, possibly because of the tilt bias but also because of the small chip size.

Sensor: 1/3″ CMOS AR0130CS(Color)
Resolution: 1.2Mega Pixels 1280×960
Pixel Size: 3.75µm
Bayer Pattern: GRBG

Older image from the 2.1mm lens

From here we will let it run overnight and see if the night sky is in sharp focus or not, and also decide on whether to change the angle bias at all. It looks pretty good right now down to the horizon and just a little bit more.. and that may be good as is.

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Solar M3.9 Flare 2021May07 19:10 UTC

May08
by catz on May 8, 2021 at 09:40 and modified on May 8, 2021. at 09:45
Posted In: astronomy

M3.9 Flare 2021May07 19:10UTC

The data closeup from the SCGO Radiojove radio telescope system for the M3.9 class flare from active region 2822 just coming onto the sun on 2021 May 07.

The spaceweatherlive android app gave us a smartphone alert very early on, allowing us to watch the event in progress. Unfortunately the audio recording system failed Oh well, more time to fix it for the next time.

The Y axis levels are relative, but generally they are lower than 2000. We start recording after a 4500 value (when it works).

The radiojove data gets saved out at 00:00UTC, then we can load it and generate a custom graph.

You can see live data updated every 30 minutes at https://starlightcascade.ca/radiojove/

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Solar Flare C8.6 20210422-2006UTC

Apr23
by catz on April 23, 2021 at 08:37 and modified on April 23, 2021. at 08:38
Posted In: astronomy

Its Solar Flare Season again!
This note came from the Radiojove email list from John Avellone, Shenandoah Valley Virginia/West Virginia):
“More solar activity @ 20MHz. Attached chart for 200330 – 200730 shows the RSP VI/1 bursts associated with a C8.5 XRA flare.”
This is his data:

John Avellone, Shenandoah Valley Virginia/West Virginia) USA
This prompted us to go back to our own Radiojove system and extract the image below from roughly the same time frame. Yes! Confirmation again!
Since that analysis, we’ve increased the number of X and Y axis ticks to help more easily identify timings, and the master reference as to when and how big the flare was comes from https://spaceweatherlive.com/

As another point of information, we have been trying to determine the beam width of the dual dipole antenna. This flare helps. At 20:06 UTC = 16:06 EDT the sun’s azimuth was 244 deg, which is 244-180=64 degrees west of south.
Symmetrically this should mean the dipole beam is at least 64*2=128 degrees wide.


SCGO Yarker Ontario Canada

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SCGO renos and repairs part 2

Apr22
by catz on April 22, 2021 at 09:40 and modified on April 22, 2021. at 09:42
Posted In: astronomy


Most rolloff roof observatory designs have a “flippy board” feature that flips up before rolling the roof off. This allows for clearance of any instruments you may have inside, and covers the gap when the roof is closed, where the roof meets the wall.

In the past, when we had a metal roof, we used a large flippy board (ie very tall) as the roof span was 10′ and the roof integrity was such that it did in fact sag. Especially when loaded down with wet snow.
So we needed a larger clearance. When the roof blew off and was replaced with this wooden roof in 2018, we reused as much as we could including this flippy board made of 3/8″ plywood, with some 1×4’s as stiffening, in an 8′ section and a 2′ section.

We know.. a recipe for disaster/failure. Well, three years later, the flippy board has to go. It had warped so much that it did not keep out the weather in many places.

So, off it came and we decided upon building up the wall section to meet the roof with a small a clearance as possible. Since the new wooden roof was much stronger, and showed now signs of sag at all, we aimed for a 1/4″ clearance between roof and wall.

It was built from a 5/4″x6″ cedar board that came from the old metal roof skirt. Being a little short, two pieces were made and attached. In addition, a 1×4″ was mounted on the roof section to provide a nailing surface that stuck out a bit for the weatherstripping cover we would add later, also scavenged from the flippy board. This is the final part, old lawn edging attached and covering the 1/4 to 1/2″ gap. It turned out to be a little inflexible, so slits were cut vertically in it from the bottom, every foot or so. Now it closes without too much force.
The first weather test was the snow and rain we received a few days later… so far, no snow or rain inside!

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Double the compost, double the fun!

Apr22
by catz on April 22, 2021 at 09:28
Posted In: gardening

Compost. What fun. We’ve had and used a compost pile for kitchen scraps, yard waste, etc for years. But as always with compost piles, they never get treated correctly, oft forgotten and in the end, after a few years, one digs into them, finds a hornets nest and gets stung a lot.

So this year, we decided (after watching one too many gardening videos) to try again and come up with a workable system. Having two areas instead of just one seemed to be a good idea, so we expanded the existing compost pile, made from wood pallets, into two. This will allow us to fill up and use one while the other thinks and decomposes. Wood pallets lined with chicken wire on the inside allows good airflow, rain access and keeps the stuff inside.
We still need a front gate.. that will come soon.

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SCGO renos and repairs

Apr22
by catz on April 22, 2021 at 09:24
Posted In: astronomy

The Starlight Cascade Gardens and Observatories 1st rolloff roof observatory was built in 2003. It is an 8×10 metal shed from Canadian Tire that was repurposed. The external rails/outriggers are 2×8 originally (2003) and sistered later on for a wider track for the wheels. They have been alternately painted, stained and varathaned, all in an attempt to preserve them.
After 18 years they are disintegrating.

So the latest plan is to cap them with a metal to provide bot some protection to stop further damage, and to provide a better rolling surface for the seven 3″ wheels on the rail.
So we found some old metal infrastucture from the old metal roof shed that blew off 3 years ago and pounded them flat. They were installed and then pounded again into an “L” shape and then screwed in.

The existing 1/4 round is used as a guide/ridge for the wheels to stay on track. They were removed and then put back in place again.

So, in the end, of the two x16′ of rail, we were able to cover approx 18′.. we ran out.
Even so, the roof does move better now than before, and once we can find more material to complete the project.. Yay!

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Supersid update

Apr19
by catz on April 19, 2021 at 08:32 and modified on April 19, 2021. at 08:43
Posted In: astronomy, tech

The SuperSID radio telescope system has had some coding updates. As of yesterday:
The supersidpi data logger copies its data every hour to the file server
every hour the file server strips the header from the CSV file, changes commas to spaces and then takes that data file and feeds it to gnuplot, which creates a graph. After that annotations are made to add a date and timestamp when generated, a few static indicators as to when sunrise sunset are generally, and then uploads it to this website.
we’ll post the code a little later down.
NAA.png
At the moment we are only monitoring the NAA station in Maine, mainly as we always get a good signal from it, less so the station in Washington state and north dakota.
In the future we hope to add NOAA data points as well, ie when *they* detect SIDs.
On our own Supersid page we have our live data as well as that of the University Louisville SID system, which we use as a reference.

This is running on a linux fedora server
#/bin/bash
#2021april18
#process supsidpi data hourly
#new data arrives on the hour :00, do this on the :01
cd /web/supersid/data
datestamp=`date +%Y%m%d`
timestamp=`date +%H%M%S`
year=`date +%Y`
month=`date +%m`
date=`date +%d`
echo datestamp=$datestamp
datafile=$datestamp’Ch0.csv’
cp $datafile ../data1.csv
cd /web/supersid
echo remove headers
tail -n +15 data1.csv > data2.csv
echo replace commas
# need to clean up the data, remove the comma, replace with space
sed -i ‘s/,/ /’ data2.csv
cp data2.csv supersidpidata.csv
echo makeagraph!
gnuplot gnu2
echo start png annotation 1600×1200
convert -fill blue -pointsize 36 \
-draw ‘text 230,130 “Sudden Ionospheric Disturbance Radio Telescope System”‘ \
-draw ‘text 140,160 “~sunset night ~midnight ~sunrise daytime ~sunset “‘ \
-draw ‘text 400,200 “Generated: ‘$datestamp’ ‘$timestamp’ Eastern Time” ‘ \
NAA.png NAA1.png
cp NAA1.png NAA.png
echo archive NAA
cp NAA.png archive/NAA-$datestamp.png

the code in the gnuplot file gnu2 looks like this

#!/usr/bin/gnuplot
reset
set terminal png
set terminal pngcairo enhanced font “arial,12” fontscale 1.6 size 1600,1200
set output ‘NAA.png’
set xdata time
set timefmt “%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S”
set format x “%H:%M”
set xlabel “time UTC”
set ylabel “relative intensity”
set yrange [0:6000000]
set title “SuperSIDpi Starlight Cascade Gardens & Observatory-Yarker Ontario Canada Lat 44.37N Long 76.77W ”
set key reverse Left outside
set grid
set style data linespoints
plot “supersidpidata.csv” using 1:3 title “NAA 24.0KHz”

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Mid April 2021

Apr15
by catz on April 15, 2021 at 09:56 and modified on April 15, 2021. at 09:58
Posted In: tech, weather

An interim post… weather has been nicer and warmer than average over the last two weeks, but now that has passed and we are back to below average temperatures and cloud and rain.
A lot of yard work was completed, all flower beds raked, all veg beds pretty much prepped for planting.. and now we wait for the weather to clear and the provincial stay-at-home order to expire on or about 2021 May 6th.
The mail and amazon still work, so it was very easy to order a 480GB SSD drive ($66Can) to upgrade my personal laptop. It has a 120GB SSD drive and has been getting close to being full.

The day it arrived, a Kingston A400, it went into a USB3 external case, plugged into the USB3 port of the laptop, and the laptop was rebooted from a CDROM of Clonezilla. 15 minutes later the internal drive had been cloned to the external drive. 5 minutes after that, the laptop had been opened, the 120GB drive removed, the 480GB drive installed, and the laptop put back together and booted…
And it worked!
It is always pleasant to have technology work the way it is supposed to, and is expected to.
The new drive still had the original partition size of approx 100GB but windows could not expand it (my pc, manage, storage space, expand) because the recovery partition was at the end of the C: partition.
So the machine was rebooted with the CDROM of GParted. The recovery partition was moved to the end of the drive and the machine rebooted into windows 10 again.
Windows was then able to expand the 100GB partition to use the full space available.
GParted was able to expand the partition as well, but in this case we wanted to see if Windows would behave as well.

Two great utilities that everyone should have, who deal with storage devices.
Clonezilla and Gparted

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ISS

Apr02
by catz on April 2, 2021 at 11:07 and modified on April 2, 2021. at 11:13
Posted In: astronomy


The International Space Station last evening (Thursday 2021 April 01) around 21:00EDT. This is a combined overnight startrail image with the bright streak from upper right to lower left being the Station.

A great overhead pass in clear skies with no moon, as captured by the Allsky1pi camera system.
It is wonderful to stand outside and watch the Station and the Crew go by.

Date Brightness Start Highest point End Pass type
(mag) Time Alt. Az. Time Alt. Az. Time Alt. Az.
01 Apr -3.8 20:54:32 10° WNW 20:57:55 86° NNE 20:59:10 36° ESE visible

North is up, west is right, east is left. If you look closely you can also see a meteor trail.
Also of interest are the various colours of different stars. Lastly many star trails were interrupted due to passing cloud through the night.

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Radiojove issue

Apr02
by catz on April 2, 2021 at 10:34 and modified on April 3, 2021. at 09:02
Posted In: astronomy


Yes.. another astronomy post… well.. it just snowed again yesterday and went down to -7C this morning.. so gardening season is not quite here yet.
So.. onto RadioAstronomy!
On sunday morning at 08:30EDT, the data intensity levels from this radiojove receiver (now operating for 10 years 24/7), went from approx 1.5K to 31K. turning on a speaker brought forth noise. loud noise. Eventually the unit was brought inside and taken apart. No evident damage inside (ie no exploded capacitors, burnt components, etc).
Plugged it into 12vdc power and inserted headphones and turned it on… NOISE!
wow. ok.. that is the issue then. Not the USB sound adapter, not the laptop, not the antenna.
Checking the power supply first.. hmm only shows 11.1VDC without a load. That seems a little low.
Lets replace that first and see what happens… now rooting through bins of power adapters….

**Update 2021April02
After testing the 12vdc power adapter, and then testing another (spare) one at 12.56vdc, the spare power supply worked! The old power supply failed! The radiojove system is operational again as of Friday afternoon with what looks like good data, and good levels.

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The Last Pi

Mar25
by catz on March 25, 2021 at 15:14 and modified on March 25, 2021. at 15:15
Posted In: tech

raspberry pi

The last Pi.
We have one last Raspberry Pi Model 1 B available and will be trying to set it up as well. We are short one power supply, so that was ordered today and should be here shortly.
This older model has only two USB2 ports, HDMI, ethernet but no wifi. So we’ve added a USB wifi adapter with the intent of using it to drive a motion detecting webcam.
A 4GB SDcard was written with Raspbian Buster lite 21010111 operating system using the raspberry pi imaging software.

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Raspberry Pis Rule

Mar22
by catz on March 22, 2021 at 09:41
Posted In: tech


Raspberry Pis are Great. Raspberry Pis Rule!
Not only do they reduce our electrical/environmental loads, but they are stable as heck.
Our weatherpi now has an uptime of 61 days. It data logs from the acurite weather station here.
Our allskypi now has an uptime of 100 days. It data logs from our allsky camera.
Our newly configured supersidpi has an uptime of 8 days. It data logs from our SuperSID radio telescope system.
Once configured and up and running these things are great. No windows7 or windows10 system can match them.

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