Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

A really really nice fireball overnight. attached is the nightly summary image, the event image and if not too big, the 8 second video

20250910 04:31:30 UTC = 00:31:30 EDT

Nightly Summary:

Event itself:

8 second video:

This is a 9 image animated .GIF from the SCGO Allsky1 camera system of the Ariane6 rocket fuel dump that many saw Tuesday evening from 22:32-22:38 EDT in the East and Northeast.

The images were reduced down to 1024×1024 before animating. Fuel dumps are always an interesting sight in the night sky.

You can see other images and videos at

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/video/SNCR4Kov

Science Rendezvous Kingston is a FREE, annual science festival for Southeastern Ontario families hosted by Queen’s University.

Our 2025 event will take place Saturday, May 10, 10 am – 3 pm, at the Slush Puppie Place and on The Tragically Hip Way, featuring: 60 booths

RASC-KC participated again this year. We have not been involved every year since 2011 but have been darn close to most of the events.

A big thanks to the volunteers. Bruce, Laurie, Devon, John, Peggy, Rick, Susan, Roger, Kim and Kevin.

We parked across the street and started setting up at 08:30. We had a from ScienceRendezvous a shade tent, 3 tables and 8 chairs.

Notes and thoughts for next year.

Stickers continue to be a big hit in the 3-8 year olds range. Starfinders again a big hit… most of the little ones do not have smartphones yet 🙂

Moon charts not as popular. We also had some leftover colour pages, mazes, etc. That might still be a popular take home item.

Lunch was provided.. sandwich, fruit, cookie and water.

This is the best outreach event… we don’t organize but piggyback and help out someone else’s event.

From SciRen:

> We’re still in the process of gathering final numbers, but I’m happy to share that we had approximately 4,700 visitors throughout the day.
Our location was right next to the entrance/exit and as a result we got the best foot traffic of all of the booths.

Scopes were set out on the road with extension cords from the building (we provided).

We have donated an organizing clear plastic bin to store items in from event to event, stored at our home.

Bringing your own telescope operating comfy chair is a good plan, as well as a cover and rope/bungie cord for when you need to go on a biobreak.

Also recommended to spend some time and go through the event yourself.

1) The shade tent might be nice but most years there are bad winds and the tent quickly becomes a liability. We had to take it down midday. Here’s a thought. Lets NOT request the tent next time. If the weather is really bad, we would move indoors.

2) The winds again… We hang poster off the tent at the back and invariably they get blown around, damaged, and cannot actually be looked at.

Suggest: NO Large posters outdoors next year.

3) Table displays. Winds again.. We need to come up with better wind resistant table displays. We brought some rocks and clips but they were not enough.

4) power. the x5 extension cords worked out but there was still a tripping hazard, running children, wagons, strollers, etc.

I would suggest moving to portable battery power for those that can use 12vdc and also 110vac inverters and batteries for others. The Centre should pick up another 1 or 2 batteries for this style of outreach and we should encourage members to get their own as well.

5) signage. We could not find the large centre sign this year but even then, when put on the front of the table, it cannot be seen because of people standing in front. We need some more RASC-KC Centre signage that is smaller perhaps.. ie laminated 8.5″x11″ that just have our name and logo and website.. also “Kingston Astronomy Club”

6) I counted my own encounters by having 75 astro trading cards at the start and handing them out to each person who stopped, chatted or looked through the Gibbs dobsonian telescope. I ran out and got another 100 and gave out about 75. So my encounters were around 150. I did shut down several times for lunch, walking around etc.

Most of the telescopes were solar observing.. there was no moon or other target available. I used the RASC-KC Gibbs 6″ dobsonian telescope to allow everyone to handle and touch and move the scope around… mostly looking at the apartment building under construction. This was also a big hit as we normally don’t allow the little ones to manhandle the solar scopes.

It was a very long day (08:30-15:30) with setup and teardown plus travel time.

But it was a blast! Please consider volunteering next year… it does not have to be the full event.. even a half day or a few hours would help

Lucky imaging, Firecapture, ROI and cutouts

Planetary Imaging took a Quantum Leap with the advent of Lucky Imaging and digital cameras.
Lucky imaging is the process of taking thousands of very short (millisecond) exposures, analyzing them, taking the best x% and stacking them to get a great signal to noise ration and images that surpass film based, ground based images from only a decade or two ago.

The shorter the exposure, the better chance of capturing a still image freer of distortion caused by atmospheric bad seeing. So the higher frames per second is the measure to work for.

I recently submitted an image of Mars to the BAA along with some information like… 2ms exposure and I was getting 100 frames per second (fps). 1000/2=500 fps theoretical and I was getting only 20% of that. The recommendation to me was to improve! Get a faster FPS! And use the ROI (Region Of Interest) and Cutout boxes in firecapture.

With the full resolution of the ZWO ASI585MC camera (3840×2160 pixels) and a 3.5ms exposure, I got 47 fps, or about 16% efficiency. The ROI reduces, at the camera, the amount of data coming down the usb 3.0 pipeline and results in increased frame rates.

I had been using a ROI of 1200×1200. That increased the fps to 83 from 47 (full resolution) and 29% efficiency. My best test result was using an ROI of 400×400 that achieved 220 fps or 77% efficiency.

There are issues with tracking and keeping the image in the Field of View (FOV), especially in bad seeing, where the image jumps up down left right and in and out) when the ROI is small.. that is why I had a bigger 1200×1200 FOV to start with.

The next feature I started using recently was the cutout box. This centres the image in the FOV and does it faster than the autoalign feature in Firecapture. It also reduces the amount of data saved to file.
Initially I started using a cutout box of 600×600 and am now testing it down to 400×400.

One other new feature that I was unaware of was the ability to have the ROI centre itself. In the past, I would set the ROI and in the 120 seconds of imaging run, the target would stay in the FOV, but maybe not the next or the next runs, without manually adjusting the tracking. This new feature of ROI autocentre means that as the target drifts out to the edge of FOV, it would recentre itself.

Amazing! This would work for at least 10-15 runs that I have tested so far. The limiting factor is when you run out of chip completely.
So.. the summary is:
initial starting performance with my setup for Jupiter imaging:
Celestron C9.25, x1.5 barlow, ZWO ASI585MC
usb cable3m,
HP Mini elitedesk 800 G3 computer
Intel Core I5-6500T; 16GB DDR4; Intel HD Graphics 530; Windows 10 pro 64 bit;
480GB nvme ssd; gigabit ethernet; USB 3.0
.SER file format
firecapture buffer enabled

Two extreme examples, image ID #138 and 136:
Case #1: Full resolution 120second run at 3.5ms exposure hit 47 fps got 5582 frames at 16% efficiency. Using the best 10% in autostakkert! Gave me 558 frames which is a pretty low signal to noise ration giving a notsogreat image quality.
Case #2: Last nights test of ROI 400×400, autocentering, cutout box of 400×400 hit 220fps giving 26091 frames at 77% efficiency. Using the best 10% to stack gives me 2609 frames, 4 times more signal to noise than before.
Looking at the images themselves

Case#1

Case#2

Looking at the images zoomed in a lot, Case#2 image is superior with much less noise resulting from the increased frame rate and more frames to stack as signal. Smaller ROI and cutouts are in fact better!

These were taken in poor seeing and poor transparency and a lot of wind and wind gusts. I really hope to test this again under much better seeing conditions!
There is still more work to do and maybe gain a little more efficiency.

There are potential bottlenecks still:
Usb3.0 data rate vs camera output
usb cable quality and length
usb port on computer
usb bus inside computer
data rate to drive (nvme faster than sata)
computer cpu and ram

USB cables are the bane of imagers… having spares and testing/swapping them out may have large effects.

Ensure that the usb port you are using for the camera is used by nothing else (ie a hub with a usb2 keyboard or mouse connected as well). Those will slow down the bus rate and the camera will be affected.

There are few planetary images in our Centre… so most of this article may not be of interest to you. Now. It will make a great reference in the future if you do enter into planetary imaging!

This is the best image of the run of imaging of Jupiter Tuesday evening. The highlight of the night was a double moon shadow transit, Europa first and smallest and second Ganymede and larger.

Form left to right is:

Ganymede shadow, Europa shadow, Europa, Ganymede

seeing was poor, transparency was poor and winds were gusty. Clouds rolled in before the transits were complete 🙁

This is the best image of the 49 runs, the best 10% 10K frames at 3ms ramping up to 10ms at the end of the 49 runs.

Jupiter diameter is only 38 arcseconds
Below is the animated GIF of the 49 runs.

Jupiter Impact Detection

Besides imaging Jupiter for the outofthisworldlisness of Jupiter, its moons transitting the surface, its moon shadows transitting its surface, the Great Red Spot, bands and belts, and many other spots, amateurs can also watch for impacts on Jupiter itself. Anyone remember Comet Shoemaker Levy 9 in 1994?

So.. I have been aware of this concept, and even used the DeTect software package from time to time… but never in a consistent manner. During a Citizen Science Education and Public Outreach Webinar on Feb 23rd, I learned something tremendous. One can install Detect (https://github.com/DeTeCt-PSWS/DeTeCt-MFC/releases/tag/v3.9.0) on the same system as Autostakkert! v4 (https://www.autostakkert.com/) and… wait for it…

autostakkert!v4 will automatically invoke DeTect and have it search for Jupiter Impacts *whilst* at the same time, doing its normal stacking process!

As seen in this image (autostakkertdetect.jpg) .. there is a tiny icon that looks like Jupiter (highlighted) and the check box is now checked after install of DeTect on the system.

I am looking forward to have this additional value added science tool for use in the future. In the meantime you can also run it on the raw saved .SER files from the past. For those RASC-KC members that ask.. why do you save your raw data? This is another great reason!

So I fired up DeTect and aimed it at my online archive of 2025 Jupiter .SER raw video files. Processing those 87 files of approx 528GB will probably take a few hours. Especially since I just saw that there were also some Mars files in there… I wonder what it will do with them? After that I will starting running through 2024, month by month, probably in overnight runs.

This is the realtime display (image detect.jpg) of the software at work.

There is another big impact imaging project aimed at detecting lunar impacts… But I haven’t tried that out yet 🙂

(https://www.nasa.gov/meteoroid-environment-office/lunar-impact-monitoring/)

I must have been already brain frozen last night after two Jupiters (I had actually thought I did many more than that! Go Figure!), I thought to myself.. lets do Mars.. its not that cold out here!
This is the best of three runs of Mars, each run was 120 seconds.
Best 15% of 10k frames, at an altitude of 32 degrees.. more air to look through.