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…
Napanee Community Food Bank Garden Updated
It is well into drought now.. no real rain for weeks. We stopped in to do some weeding and watering at the Napanee Community Food Bank Garden on Thursday July…
Weather sensors
Weather sensor positioning is very much a fine art. Over the 10 years of running a weather station here at Starlight Cascade Observatory & Gardens, we have moved the sensors…
Manduca quinquemaculata
From wikipedia.org The five-spotted hawkmoth (Manduca quinquemaculata) is a brown and gray hawk moth of the Sphingidae family. The caterpillar, often referred to as the tomato hornworm, can be a…
Graphics coprocessors (GPUs)
In the great scheme of processing SETI@Home radio telescope data since 1999 April 12, I have mostly relied on well-behind-the-leading-edge of computer hardware. A few months ago I was fortunate…