Archive for December, 2022

3 results.

Geminid Meteor Shower 2022

Dec15
by kevin on December 15, 2022 at 15:28
Posted In: astronomy

One of the best performances of a meteor show in years!

Mostly because there were no clouds!

For the night of Monday/Tuesday 2022 December 12/13, 39 events were recorded on

https://starlightcascade/allsky2/

> This camera is from the University of Western Ontario Meteor Physics Group and is part of the Southern Ontario Meteor Network, and has been running with at least 4 cameras since 2004 December.
> Today there are 19 active cameras in the system from Collingwood in the north to Kincardine in the west, to the UWO campus in London in the South and now here in Yarker to the east. (Updated: Now the easternmost camera is located at the Canadian Space Agency Headquarters outside of Montreal.)
> This “system 10” was installed and operational on 2012 June 08. Images are 640×480 and are captured from a video feed.

And this is from the night of Tuesday/Wednesday 2022 December 13/14, with 134 events recorded :

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Mars 2022 Dec 09

Dec12
by kevin on December 12, 2022 at 12:05 and modified on December 12, 2022. at 12:08
Posted In: astronomy

It looks like both of us imaged Mars at very near the same time. I did x36 four minute imaging runs from 21:37 to 00:02 EST. exposure was 0.2ms ! wow! Registax has a filename issue when there are decimal points in the name, so I had to work around that.

Two places to identify features:

https://skyandtelescope.org/wp-content/plugins/observing-tools/mars_profiler/mars.html#

https://britastro.org/2022/mars-mapper-updated-for-2022

The BAA one seems to work a little better but cannot invert the image.

In any event, I start on Jupiter Friday evening and then whilst inside the house went to Mars and started, hence the camera also could/should have been rotated a bit to get north up but is off the the right.

The best shot I think is at 04:40 UTC = 11:40 EST, mainly due to altitude, an amazing 58 degrees! It went up as high as 71 degrees but seeing got a little worse.

I skipped the RGB autobalance in registax as it took away wayyyy too much red.

This entire sequence was the best 5%.. not to bad … 42K frames

So this is much like the quicklook at Mars I posted a couple of days ago

And finally, the 36 workable frames turned into an animated .GIF (2MB.. sorry folks!)

Looking forward to Monday evening… will not be able to stay up until midnight then, but at last 21:00 EST methinks. Mars will still get pretty high, and hopefully I will be barlow enabled. I decided to add back in the 90 deg diagonal until such time as the extension tubes arrive. It’s a good diagonal though… dielectric 99% reflectivity. On the downside another optical surface for dust to make spots!

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Jupiter 2022 Dec 09

Dec12
by kevin on December 12, 2022 at 11:58 and modified on December 12, 2022. at 12:10
Posted In: astronomy


The best of Jupiter on Friday evening, just after it went past due south az=180 degrees.

The best 5% of the run with 30K frames… I think I will reprocess the best 10%.. these look a little noisy. I’m using a 400×400 pixel region of interest and autostakkert! embiggens it by 1.5x resulting in a 600×600 pixel image.

Good: altitude, transparency above average, Wind from NNE

Poor: near full moon, seeing

Io and Europa are in this shot, with both going right to left behind the planet. The GRS (is not really so Great!) is *just* coming on the left limb.

The animated .GIF is also attached, 47 frames, and I did move the camera after a first few, trying to make a barlow work. It didn’t

1ms exposures (actually just a little less than that) from 30K frames in a 180 second run.

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