Archive for December, 2020

3 results.

Jupiter 2020dec15

Dec17
by catz on December 17, 2020 at 09:08 and modified on December 18, 2020. at 15:30
Posted In: astronomy

Best 5% of 4K frames

It has been a typical November month of cloud.. but we were able to get outside Tuesday evening and image the now very very low altitude Jupiter.

This is the best 5% of the 4000 frames taken in 180 seconds.

This was taken at 22:28 UTC on 2020Dec15th, or 17:28 EST.
Jupiter is only 13 degrees above the horizon and has an apparent diameter of 33.4 arc seconds, much smaller than just a few months ago.
In addition there was the outer edges of a cloud front coming up from the south, adding to the poor transparency and poor seeing.

Best 10% of 4K frames
This is the same image but processed with the best 10% of the 4000 frames.
More data means a better date to noise ration and a little bit cleaner image

Finally this is the same image processed with 50% of the 4000 frames
Best 50% of 4K frames
Here we get more of the bad frames as part of the final image.
Lastly, since I did not get a chance to annotate these images
here is an image of the setup used.

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Allsky1pi did *not* capture 2020dec07 fireball event

Dec13
by catz on December 13, 2020 at 11:32
Posted In: astronomy

After the great “Brockville” fireball of 2020dec07, 19:30EST, we checked allsky1pi as well to see if it recorded the event that allsky2 (UWO) captured.

It did not.

Hmm… wonder why not?

After days of troubleshooting we came across an interesting anomaly.

The allsky1pi camera performs autoexposure from early dusk through dark and into early dawn. Looking at Sunday’s data, we had approx 540 images at 161MB, and during the dark cycle these maxed out at 60 seconds.

Interestingly enough, the config file for the software lists exposures and maxexposures at 90 seconds. hmmm.. looking more carefully at each image, they are in fact timestamped 90 seconds apart, not 60.

hmmm.

It seems that the camera is exposing up to a max of 60 seconds and then waiting for 30 seconds to fulfill the configuration file’s 90 sec entry.

Checking the camera stats, it says it can do up to 1000seconds. So.. a possible problem explained but not fixed.

https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/product/asi120mc-color

We changed the configuration to 60seconds for exposure and maxexposure and reviewing the last two nights, it seems to be working. Timestamps are now only 60 seconds apart for 60 sec exposures and there are approx 820 images now at 270MB.

So the most likely answer as to why allsky1 did NOT capture the event.. it happened in the30 second deadtime between exposures.

OK.. that is now fixed! no more missing time!

Still have to figure out what is responsible for limiting it to only 60 seconds? The camera hardware itself in some way? The autoexposure has some limiting factor configured somewhere else? Gremlins?

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Fireball Monday 2020Dec07 19:30:38 EST

Dec10
by catz on December 10, 2020 at 16:11 and modified on December 10, 2020. at 16:25
Posted In: astronomy

A nice fireball entered the atmosphere around 95km up just north of Fort Drum in Upper New York State, heading north, and ending 36km up just northwest of Brockville Ontario.
2020 December 07 19:30:38 EST
2020 December 08 00:31:38 UTC

We had been outside just prior to this, photographing Jupiter and Saturn but had gone in just before.

The default source of reports can be found here: https://fireball.amsmeteors.org/members/imo_view/event/2020/7440

The event was detected by three meteor cameras (Yarker, Oak Heights and Ottawa) belonging to The University of Western Ontario’s Southern Ontario Meteor Network.
A complete writeup with video from all three camera systems can be found here:
https://fireballs.ndc.nasa.gov/skyfalls/events/20201208-003040

This is the video captured at the system based here:

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