This is Saturn, early in the morning on Thursday 2024 July 18.
It is nearing transitting due south, its highest point in the sky, but for now remains very low.
This causes us to see through a lot more atmosphere than otherwise and the image suffers from poor focus, atmospheric dispersion and a lot of bad seeing.
This is the best 10% of 8400 frames at 21ms each in a 180 second run. Altitude was about 40 degrees and Saturn’s size is about 18 arcseconds.
The version below is the original 11MB higher resolution version.
Serendipidy got us up and outside at 04:00 this morning and only then realized that it was one of the rare Titan transits the planet Saturn dates! The transit ran from 02:00-06:00 EDT approximately.
It was not forecast to be clear this morning and indeed it was not. quite a lot of haze (transparency poor, seeing average) and I got 9 imaging runs done as the cloud rolled in along with the fog.
exposures were approx 35ms in a 180 second run.
This image was the best of 10%, processed with autostakkert! v4 , drizzled x1.5 and then into registax for wavelet processing.
The scope continues to behave well as Saturn did in fact appear in the FOV of the primary camera after the initial slew to Saturn.
Titan appears as a dark spot near the bottom of Saturn.
Below is an animated .GIF of the 9 imaging runs, with the last ramping up from 35ms to 50ms and a lot of cloud.
The animated GIF shows Titan moving from left to right.
After months or procrastinating, some time made it available to process some of the imagery collected during the total solar eclipse of 2024 april 08.
The first three files here were .SER files and converted using PIPP into .avi and also cropping it down to 400×400 pixels.
Because it was quite cloudy here, many of the files were dark. These were deleted. We started with 138 files, and after deleting, about 100 video files.
They were combined using microsoft movie maker and then sped up x16, x32 and x64.
I noticed that some of these were incorrectly cropped by PIPP because of the cloud and general darkness… so they will be reprocessed at maybe 500×500 or 600×600 ine the near future
This is the best of 5 runs of Saturn taken on Monday morning July08… Up and outside at 04:00 EDT was an experience!
This was the best 10% of 9300 frames at 19ms each. Saturn was only 38 degrees off the horizon and there was intermittent wispy high cloud going by as well.
I’ve taken to change my process of: focussing, then doing a bunch of runs, to focussing, doing a run, then focussing again.. over and over. You know about lucky imaging.. this is the concept of lucky focussing 🙂 And it did work.
All 5 runs I focussed to the best of my ability and three of the results were bad!
Switching from observing and imaging in the evening to the morning now, since that is where all the planets be. This is a session Friday morning starting at 04:00 EDT and ending about one hour later. This close to the summer solstice, dark does not last very long and even at 04:00 EDT it was pretty darn light out.
The other new major change was in the focuser, moving from a remote rack and pinion focuser that had a lot of backlash and image shift, to a remote moonlight CS focuser that had no backlash and no image shift. It made focussing much easier.. hopefully it will help in making it better as well.
This is the best of 15 runs of Saturn. The range of quality across even just one hour was amazing. Some high cloud had drifted in and out during the session.
So, this is the best 10% of 11K frames of 16ms each. A UV/IR cut filter is in the optical chain along with an Antares x1.5 barlow.
Saturn’s ring are approaching edge on and will be getting dimmer and dimmer until they are edge on in 2025 March.
Saturn is only 18 arc seconds large at magnitude 0.9
This was captured with Saturn only 35 degrees above the horizon. with an equivalent airmass of 1.74 It will continue to move westward (higher), the skies will get darker and so in a few weeks Saturn is improving in imaging circumstances.
Below is an animated .GIF of the 15 processed images:
With the installation of a custom metal adapter, the moonlight focuser is now mounted to the Vixen VC200L cassegrain scope. The old focuser was disconnected from power and remains in place.
Saturday morning around 03:30 was the first attempt at first light with the new setup… and one the very first slew, what with new equipment, new mounts, new cables… a cable caught, stopped the mount cold and thank goodness for clutches!
it was late.. the stars had gone already, so no realignment. I told the mount to park.. and of course it parked 30-40 degrees offtarget. I had thought it would know where that is from the encoders.. guess not. slipped the clutch, pointed it roughly north, at least so the building would clear when rolling on and shut down.
Saturday evening was the next chance .. 22:30 was finally dark enough to see some stars to do an alignment. It picked Arcturus… in the south! I only ever remember Arcturus in the east or west.. never south! I used the telrad to find it.. it was 30-50 degrees away. Drove it there with the hand controller until centered in the telrad 1/2 degree circle.
It was in the findercamera FOV. Used the virtual handcontroller to get Arcturus in the center of the prime camera. The next star was Vega. Did the same for that. Successful align! I remember to do only 2 star rather than 3 star… 2 star seems more reliable to be sure.
Parked the scope, powered down, powered up, goto the moon. It went to the moon!
Yay! The mosquitos were swarming saturday night so I did 23 quick 15 second runs on the moon, trying to get all of it to make a mosaic. The camera was not at 90 degrees to the terminator, so getting a grid was difficult. I thought I had it.
This morning I ran all 23 through Autostakkert and went outside to do yardwork.
After that was completed using the best 25% of the frames, I discovered the method to do batch processing of wavelets in Registax. And it worked! That saved a *lot* of mouse clicks and time. Again. Set it to run, go away and come back in an hour and they are done.
The last step was to put these 23 frames into MS Image Composite Editor and away it went. This is the result (reduced in pixels from 10kx10k to 1024×768)
As you can see, I missed one grid portion 🙁 so sad!
Two other sections have green artefacts and two sections you can see the borders.
unsure why that happened but as always… practice practice practice!
Oh well. More cable management with velcro and things are coming together.
After 2-3 years of attempts, this snapshot of the full moon may be finally the image I was looking for.
No other combination of telescope, camera lens, and camera gave me the full disk and for the requirements of the certificate, no processing was allowed.
This was taken with a 600mm Focal Length refractor, exposed for 2.9ms and focused manually.
Science Rendezvous Kingston is an educational outreach event led by Queen’s University. This year again it was held in the downtown area, recently renamed to the Slush Puppy Place, on Saturday 2024 May 11th.
“Southeastern Ontario’s largest free family science fair is back on Saturday, May 11, and organizers are busily readying Slush Puppie Place in Kingston to host thousands of parents and children.
Science Rendezvous Kingston’s theme this year is “Innovate,” and there will be no shortage of demonstrations of Canadian innovation on display inside and outside Kingston’s prominent downtown stadium venue. ”
More than 5,300 individuals attended the event in 2023, which was facilitated by 430 volunteers. Last year’s Science Rendezvous won the Steam Green award from its national parent organization, in recognition of some of the special environmental and cultural projects that the Science Rendezvous Kingston crew produced that year.
The RASC Kingston Centre had 8 volunteers this year and I would like to thank them all for a great outreach event!
We ran out of many handouts including stickers, space cards and colouring handouts.
The event was opened by the Award winning Kingston Town Crier, Chris Whyman and also some words from politicians 🙁
We had four solar telescopes that people could look through or see on the projected display.
The attendance was amazing!
The first major aurora we have seen since 2023 March 23… it’s been a long time.
This is the allsky1 camera footage in the form of a video
A partial startrail from the night.. we had a lot of cloud…
and lastly the keogram of the night, a slice through each image over time.
This website was brought to our attention and it a great aid in planning to image minor planets!
https://doncarona.tamu.edu/apps/minorbody/opposition/
https://kingston.rasc.ca/asteroids
The following RASC-KC members and past members who have had Minor Planets named after them for their contributions to astronomy, as well as those related to Kingston and Queen’s University
14 Upcoming oppositions (the best time to image) sorted by date
20240616 minor planet 3269 vibert-douglas at opposition mag 17.5
20240708 minor planet 3673 levy at opposition mag 16.5
20240710 minor planet 20022 dontown at opposition mag 19.6
20240716 minor planet 9070 ensab at opposition mag 16.9
20240903 minor planet 20021 kevinkell at opposition mag 17.5
20241011 minor planet 273987 greggwade at opposition mag 21.4
20241024 minor planet 5272 dickinson at opposition mag 16.0
20241028 minor planet 6115 martinduncan at opposition mag 15.7
20241219 minor planet 5457 queen’s at opposition mag 16.5
20250126 minor planet 10062 kimhay at opposition mag 18.3
20250221 minor planet 10076 rogerhill at opposition mag 18.7
20250228 minor planet 5424 covington at opposition mag 16.0
20250507 minor planet 10065 greglisk at opposition mag 16.7
20250721 minor planet 22426 mikehanes at opposition mag 18.5
One of the many data recorders we had running during the eclipse, was our allsky1 camera system, configured to take images in the daytime. It saved one to two images per minute and we have assembled those into a video below. The start of the video is at C1, first contact, start of the partial eclipse, and ends at C4, end of the partial eclipse.
Note that totality only last for 2 minutes 4 seconds and so there are only a very few frames of that.
For those that have to deal with clouds interfering with visual astronomy, we have some words for you: Radio Astronomy!
Our Radiojove telescope system was up and running during the Total Solar Eclipse over Yarker Ontario on 2024 April 8th.
The first image below is from first to last contact (approx 18:09-20:34 UTC).
There is a very slight decrease around 19:53.
The next one is for the time of totality only (approx 19:18-19:26 UTC). The single short duration spike is likely an ionospheric radio probe.
As a comparator that the system is in fact working, here is a daily plot from April 8th:
The SCGO Serenity Observatory Imaging Kit was disassembled for maintenance and possible upgrades as the forecast was rain rain rain snow for the next serveral days.
And then of course clear skies open up Sunday evening!
I hastily reassembled the imaging kit and performed the long awaited 3 star alignment. The Skywatcher mount picked Sirius, Mirfak and Procyon.
That seemed a little notspreadapartenough but I did it and when completed it said: alignment complete… it may be poor.. which I have never seen before.
We had some discussion at the Wed RASCKC inperson meeting about 1, 2 and 3 star aligns but I did not understand it well enough to know which is best or if you should just always go and do 3 star?
So .. still no real test of the pointing as there was not enough time to park it shut it down and restart.
So instead I just went to Jupiter and used the nowworking finderscope and camera to get Jupiter within 5 seconds! Love it!
I think I am going to start using another qualifier of seeing… how well Jupiters north and south equatorial belts appear raw on the display. Last night was much better than the last session. Seeing was maybe average to poor, transparency was average.
The really really great news… again, after the polar align of the mount last time around, again two runs of 180 seconds each did not require any manual guiding… the tracking is really really good!
This was the best 10% of 18K frames.. .the annotation seems to be broken again ????
Altitude was only 26 degrees and the airmass was 2.3.. it is getting sooo close to the end of Jupiter season!
There is a little bright spot on the lower left of Jupiter, right near the limb. It *may* have been Europa just starting a transit over Jupiter moving left to right.
Last night was the first opportunity in some days to do some more work on the mount.
Previously I had raised the mount adapter by 2cm and also… forgot to lock down the roll-off building on one of those really windy nights this past week.
The building moved.. slammed into the scope, and moved stuff.
So… removed the camera, remove the barlow, remove the diagonal, insert the svbony 0.5x focal reducing lens filter adapter and put the camera back in.
Ran it over to Sirius to focus. OK. Park and shut down in the home position (should be 0 deg 0hr) start up, run sharpcap Pro Tools; polar alignment;
Polaris is in the FOV but too bright and the focal reducer is so bad the star is spread out and wiping out any chance of other stars being identified and plate solved. I ran the gain and exposure through many combinations but nothing! So sez my brain… if not the main scope how about the finder? It was aligned with the main scope earlier!
So.. that is what I did. Sharpcap and the 8×50 finder with the ASI120 camera did in fact work, plate solve and everything. I rotated the mount 90 deg in RA and sharpcap told me how very very bad the polar alignment was. Seeing the numbers on the screen I moved the mount up and down and left and right, waiting 3-6 seconds for the next image to update, and got it down to what I think was pretty excellent alignment… for a finderscope 🙂
Total Error 1 minute 26 sec
Then very carefully and very slowly were the RA and Dec nuts tightened… and the error reading did not change.
So my understanding of stuff is that the 3 star alignment dictates how good the pointing is and the polar alignment dictates how good the tracking is.
My last run I noted the tracking was very bad (I think after the building hit the mount in the wind). Last night however the tracking was … very good!
In 180 seconds I did not have to adjust the tracking at all and at the end it was still very close to where it started!
I did not have a chance to do a 3 star align after the fiddling around.. that is next time.
So.. back to Jupiter… seeing was poot, transparency was poor. Not a lot of detail or contrast at all. exposure time was higher than normal at 4ms. That tells me that I am looking through more air as Jupiter continues to drop and possibly through worse quality air as well. Airmass of 2.05 !!!
Oh! I did insert the IR cut filter for Jupiter… I have not yet determined if that changes the exposure by how much yet… another test for the future!
Best 10% of 20K frames, altitude only 29 degrees.
NEXT TIME on Survivor! Err.. Serenity Imaging!
3 star align!
pointing test!
tracking test!
exposure with and without the IR cut filter test!
oh look… Jupiter is gone for the season! 🙂
