Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

After 12 odd years, we decided it was time to renovate the SCG Observatory.
It had been going through constant minor modifications from year to year, but this time was the real thing.
First things first, all items were brought out onto the lawn. It was amazing at the quantity of items just stored inside and not actually used.

It is an 8’x10′ metal garden shed, and if you were at the May 14th RASC-KC meeting, you would have heard us not recommend this style of construction at all, ever. Never.
From snow blowing in between panels, and condensation on the underside of the roof, to being an RF faraday cage, making things like radios and syncronized clocks unworkable. Build out of wood! You will be much happier!

After all of the infrastructure was also removed, the first new item was a new, larger work surface (6′ wide x2′ deep).
Later we added shelves and cabinets above, and shelving bookcases below.

The new layout allows two people to work effectively inside whereas before we often got in each others way.

The original 48″x18″ work surface was kept and repurposed off to the other side.
All in all the start to finish time was 7 hours, during which the forecast sunny day turned out to be cloudy, rainy and even some hail fell in the afternoon.

We managed to “test drive” the new layout that night and it worked quite well.

We have a large telescope that we are in the process of commissioning. One of the items that popped out of the process was the need for a relatively low power finder telescope, with a video feed back into the control area.

We ended up with this as the last test project: a mallincam jr camera, a cmount to Pnetax K mount lens adapter (fotodiox pro PK-C), and an old (film) f2.5 135mm Takumar Pentax lens.

We hope to test it live tonight to see how sensitive the setup is.
The camera puts out an NTSC video signal, which we digitize with an AtoD converter onto a USB device bus to the computer.

The Kingston Astronomy Club (aka The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada – Kingston Centre) met Thursday night with a great turnout of 25+ people in a very small temporary room (our regular room is unavailable due to construction in Ellis Hall).

The theme of the meeting was members presentations of their personal observatories, to give ideas to those without who may wish to build, and to those who have and may wish to renovate.

The seminar room style made for a lot of back and forth Questions and Answers.
Next month (June) we have moved to a larger seminar style room.

After catching up on a little TV, waiting for the black flies to die down, and seeing Montreal was losing yet another hockey game, we went outside around 21:00 EDT and did a little observing and imaging of Jupiter.

The LX200GPS handcontroller continues to have issues. Barely a minute into operations it locked up requiring a power cycle and a 15 minute realignment. I am seriously looking at the StarPatch firmare upgrade this weekend.. 3rd party software that fixes a lot of issues and introduces some new features.

We did 7 imaging runs of 30 and 60 seconds over the course of 10 minutes. All turned out not too bad despite a low level of haze/high humidity.
Sometimes planetary imaging turns out a little better when that happens… better contrast ?

20cm scope F10, FL=2000mm, tracking not too bad. seeing average, still twilight

In any event here is the first image from 01:28UT a 30 second exposure showing the Great Red Spot clearly near the South Equatorial Band to the right side. There are some interesting features in the North Equatorial Belt as well.

This is the last image, taken some 10 minutes later.
The GRS has noticably moved. I have attempted to get some animated combinations but there is some glitch.

Would have loved to stay out all night but for pressing life needs… sleep needed for work today 🙁
Eventually will get a dusk to dawn time lapse every 5 or 10 minutes and put that together… will be awesome!