Jupiter 20161227
In the midst of a lot of cloud, there opened up a 90 minute window on Tuesday morning of clear skies. This was the first image of 37 runs, at…
Jupiter 20161225
Happy Christmas and the skies cleared a little just around 07:00EST And then they came back again -4C with winds 5-20kph from the NW Jupiter was at zenith and only…
Jupiter 20161223
After a few years of imaging now, I have gone through a few variations of recording image data. I’ve made up a new template to try out now as well……
Jupiter 20161221
Predicted to be clear this morning, got up at 05:00 EST and it was cloudy with a few holes. Went outside anyway and it turned out to be the best…
Jupiter 20161208
Another morning forecast to be cloudy but turned out to be relatively clear. Temp: -1C Transparency: average (based on 40-50ms exposure time giving 80% histogram exposure and Seeing: poor (based…
Jupiter 20161206
Surprisingly, it was “clear” again this morning, against all predictions from last evening. Rolled outside around 05:15 EST to low level fog and -5C and a frozen stuck roll off…
Jupiter 20161123
The first powerup of the 20cm meade lx200gps (circa 2003) after the operation showed a display full of garbage characters. The second powerup showed normal operation… yay! The first pass…
meade lx200gps battery replacement
As it turns out, when starting up a Meade LX200GPS telescope (circa 2003), and it displays a few rows of “taking GPS fix”, this means that the internal battery is…
KAON Saturday 2016 November 12
Greetings partially clear skies! For the first time in awhile the skies were clear enough to set up on the observing deck! The Kingston Astronomy Outreach Network (KAON) open house…
Jacking the Observatory
The Tardis Observatory is now up to 3 years old, and over that time the wooden 2×6 rails the 5″ wheels run on have degraded, warped, moved, and become rougher.…
possible fireball Tuesday 2016 October 04
There were twitter reports this morning of a possible fireball last night around 22:30 EDT. As always, media and other 3rd hand reports come with very little detail and timings…
Raspberry Pi projects #2 and 3
We have completed the R&D portions of projects 2 and 3 with the Raspberry Pi and am amazed at how flexible these things are. #2 was as a display controller…
Loud Boom! that was not Susan Ivanova*
Woke up Sunday morning to twitter and web reports of a loud noise Saturday evening, 2016 Sept 24th around 20:50 edt. http://www.kingstonregion.com/news-story/6877053-mysterious-boom-startles-south-frontenac-residents/. Local television also covered the story: http://www.ckwstv.com/2016/09/25/128535/ The…
Collimation for fun
Much more time has gone into the Torus telescope project this summer. The latest results from last night show a good night coarse collimation. The plan was daytime coarse, nighttime…
Saturn 20160826
After drying out the imaging laptop for a week, it was fired up for a quick imaging run of Saturn on Friday evening, after returning from a field trip to…