How to build a new Observatory
We are building a new roll off building observatory for a large telescope. The concept was that this would be a quick and dirty, smallest footprint possible and low cost…
stellar planetary conjunction
The RASC Observers Calendar has notable events listed in its pages. Not accessible at all unless you purchase the calendar but perhaps one year, it will be. For Tuesday August…
Lennox and Addington Dark Sky Viewing Area
We visited the Sheffield Lake Conservation area on Sunday (2012 August 19) to do some canoeing and to see the Lennox and Addington Dark Sky Viewing Area 30 minutes north…
A trip to Point Petre
In July 2012 we were in the neighbourhood of Point Petre, the sourthernmost portion of Prince Edward County, near Sandbanks Provincial Park. At one time we were considering using it…
July 18th L&AHortSoc Garden Tour
The Lennox and Addington Horticultural Society went on a members garden tour on Wednesday July 18th, 2012. Lots of nice flowers and gardens and everyone had a great time enjoying…
Perseid meteor shower peak
We were out in the evening of Saturday August 11th, 2012 but only got in about 90 minutes of viewing from 21:30 to 23:00 before the clouds rolled in. Kim…
Imagemagick and allsky1 camera image processing
Updated Thursday August 9th: Well, that did and did not work. Most of the noise went away but enough stayed to make it tough to analyze. Not only that, the…
Napanee Community Food Bank Garden Update
Looks like the lat time I wrote about the Napanee Community Food Bank Garden was back about the July 19th, 2012 visit. We skipped the next week as it was…
imagemagick noise function broken?
For some years now, we’ve used the ImageMagick package on a linux server to process our allsky1 camera images, in particular to remove noise. For some reason, that function has…
More venting for allsky camera1
It has been a hot summer, often not cooling down at night at all, for many weeks now (July, August 2012). We’ve noticed that the peltier cooled CCD camera inside…
linux fedora 15 to 16 upgrade
We’ve been running linux fedora 15 on our house server for some time… too long apparently as support for it and the updates that go along with it stopped on…
allsky2 interesting imagery
Every morning over coffee we sit down and scan through the imagery from the two allsky cameras from overnight. This morning (2012 August 02) we got some really great surprises.…
New Sudden Ionospheric Disturbance (SID) receiver goes live
We recently received a SID receiver that will detect solar storms impacting the Earth’s Ionosphere. It consists of a coiled loop antenna, in our case oriented east-west, connected to the…
Allsky camera vs the wasps
We’ve noticed wasps attempting to build nests up against the outside housing of the allsky1 camera system. We’ve taken them down twice and just noticed more wasps congregating yet again.…
Repurposing an old pier
This is a solar radio telescope pier from the decommissioned Algonquin Radio Telescope site in Ontario. We picked it up a few years ago with the intent to stick a…