Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

This is Jupiter from the same morning as the Saturn post below. Tuesday 2022 July 26 at04:45 EDT or 08:45 UTC. Jupiter is at a much higher altitude than the last several years, and also much higher than Saturn. It is approaching its highest point but is competing against the rising brightness of the Sun.
The North Equatorial Belt (NEB) is narrow but dark in colour and contrast. No Great Red Spot is seen in this image but some smaller storms are seen on the NEB and the SEB.

This is an animation of all of the imaging runs from that night. The first two images in the run are only 30 second runs, resulting in only a thousand frames or so. There are two processed images of each frame, the best 10% and the best 25% of the run.
The processing workflow is:
firecapture .ser, autostakkert! v3 to png, registax wavelet processing, ImageMagick annotation and conversion to .gif and .mpg. Some dust spots are seen here as well.

Saturn is well placed in the morning sky after midnight, approaching opposition on 2022 August 14. At 01:00 EDT it will be at its highest altitude above the horizon, due south. Unfortunately Jupiter trails behind it, so by the time I am outside at 03:00 Saturn has already gone past its peak and has started to slip down into the west.

It is a compromise between planet positions and an astronomers ability to totally screw up their sleep cycles 🙂

This first image is my first of the evening, with incorrect settings 🙂 The gain on the camera was set much to high (normally I leave it alone, but it must have stuck from an earlier session). You can see the noise and the grain in the image. It was a 30 second run using the best 25% of 1453 frames.

The last image of the session is here below, the best 25% of 3833 frames with a much lower gain, much less noise and grain as a result.

My normal image processing routine has changed a little… in the past it went like this:
firecapture SER, PIPP AVI, autostakkert! v3 PNG, registax v6 wavelets, ImageMagick for annotation.
I was finding that PIPP was cropping well, but generating a file that was much larger than the original, even with substantial cropping. The benefit of cropping was to achieve a fixed pixel size image, ie 600×600, so that the annotation code could put text in the correct places around the target of the image.
I have reprogrammed the batch annotation scripts and so far they are working out with a variable size image. the new sequence of processing is:
firecapture SER, autostakkert! v3 PNG, registax v6 wavelets, ImageMagick for annotation.

Once finalized, the original source .SER video files (huge! tens of GBs!) are moved into an archive folder and every few months that archive folder is removed with the contents going to TWO external SATA drives, one primary, one backup, and put on shelves until needed next.

This is a still image from last nights Allsky1Pi camera system, of aurora captured around 23:30:39 EDT, Thursday 2022 July 07.
The moon was above the horizon and there were clouds in the neighbourhood, so the exposure did not hit the max time of 60 seconds, only about 54 seconds. North is up. You can see the rogers cell tower in the upper left, and aurora in the upper section, both green and purple bits.
It reaches up from the horizon *almost* to Polaris.
The bottom left corner light is the sky dome light pollution from the city of Kingston.
The bottom right corner light is from the moon.

This is Saturn from Monday morning.. early Monday morning. The point of this post was to show the results of some troubleshooting with file and image management.
Over the last few years I have used Linux Fedora server and the ImageMagick package to manipulate and annotate astro images. To date I place the Northisup icon, a small image of the telescope and the Observatory. 10 years later this really helps!!
I started also annotating the filename, which contains the date and UT time, along with other info like exposure. This was provided by Firecapture. It did not however store other important information, like number of frames taken. Firecapture creates another file with all of that info.. along with a lot of other useful tidbits, like: magnitude, altitude, airmass, CMI longitude, and number of frames.
Over the years, files get misplaced. I doubt if I have any of the original firecapture .txt files from 10 years ago. So.. what if *all* of the text information was annotated to the astro image? Let’s make two versions, one with the minimal information package and another with it all!
The above image is the original minimal.
The image below is the same but with extra info added to the bottom.
None of this overwrites any of the image content itself… very important!

Next up is to center the icons at the top.
—
The bash code looks like this:
#!/bin/bash
echo starting 0annotateserenity2022july6-eq6-vixen
echo removing spaces in filenames
for f in *\ *; do mv “$f” “${f// /_}”; done
echo change filename case to lower case
for file in * ; do lower=$(echo $file | tr A-Z a-z) && [[ $lower != $file ]] && mv $file $lower ;done
echo starting image processing 2022*.png
for i in 2022*.png
do
#this is needed as the .txt file has a slightly different name than the .png file associated with it.
short=$(echo $i | cut -c 1-20 )
cp $short*.txt details.txt
echo start annotation on $i
echo add allinone icon filename to a
# work on changing 410 to center?
composite -geometry +410+5 ../allinone.png $i a.png
cp a.png c.png
echo add filename
convert c.png -gravity South -background lightblue -splice 0x20 -annotate +0+2 $i d.png
echo add kevin text d to e
convert d.png -gravity South -background lightblue -splice 0x20 -annotate +0+2 ‘Kevin Kell SCGO Serenity II Observatory Yarker Ontario Canada’ e.png
echo add mount ota text e to f
convert e.png -gravity South -background lightblue -splice 0x20 -annotate +0+2 ‘SkyWatcher AZ-EQ6GT; Vixen VC200L 200mm F9 FL=1800mm x2.0 Antares barlow =3600mm ‘ f.png
#convert e.png -gravity South -background lightblue -splice 0x20 -annotate +0+2 ‘”$i”‘ f.png
echo add copyright to f then add filename then create final file
convert -comment ‘copyright StarlightCascade Observatory ‘ \
f.png g.png
cp g.png annotated/$i-annotated.png
echo test
convert g.png -gravity South -background lightblue -splice 0x900 -annotate +0+2 @details.txt annotated/$i-annotated2.png
done
rm ?.png
rm details.txt