accurate time
Astronomers watch the mostly static skies. Once in awhile, something moves. Sometimes things move fast.. very fast. At those times it is very useful to know what time it is.…
upcoming occultation
from wikipedia.org An occultation occurs when an apparently larger body passes in front of an apparently smaller one. A transit occurs when an apparently smaller body passes in front of…
meade lx200gps mods
We are working on making the RASC-KC’s 20cm LX200GPS accessible remotely to members of the Centre. One of the many issues was a digital camera. They are expensive and all…
SID1 status
The old Sudden Ionsopheric Disturbance system 1 (SID1) does not seem to have survived the transition from the old computer running windows NT2000 and having a physical COM1 port, to…
seti@home update update
Yay! After first joining the effort on April 12, 1999, 1:58 pm Over 13 years now dedicated to signal processing radio telescope data. We have gained a few more spots…
Upcoming events next week
Monday March 18, 2013 The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada – Kingston Centre regular meeting, 7pm, Ellis Hall Room 324, Queen’s University, Kingston Ontario. “You Can Almost Touch the Stars”…
Comet C/2011 L4 ( PanSTARRS )
Canon A495, 15sec f5.8 iso 400 at 20:23 EDT Canon A2400IS, 5 sec f4.5 iso 800 at 20:20 EDT Thursday March 14th, 2013 we went out to suddenly clear skies…
New lighting for Kingston City Park
While walking through the park the other day(2013 March 11), I noted that the City of Kingston was in the process of replacing the sidewalk lighting fixtures through the park…
KAON session
On Saturday March 9th, 2013 we held another Kingston Astronomy Outreach Network Open House and Observing session at the Queen’s University Observatory on Ellis Hall. The talk was on “Heavenly…
SID2 analysis
sid2-2013feb25 (pdf) We had time to sit down and take a good look at the data coming out of the Sudden Ionospheric Detector 2 today and it matched up pretty…
New code to review allsky2 camera images
We completed new code to process all of the nights imagery from the allsky2 camera system. Not only does it run in the current “last nights run” but also can…
12 hours past the russian meteor
It’s been a good 12 hours since the world has seen the nearest near-miss since Tunguska in 1908. A very large meteor on the order of 15 metres and maybe…
Lasts nights allsky2 summary
The new code written to process the nights images from the allsky2 camera system has worked and the result of last night appears here: This is a compilation of 27…
More Imagemagick tricks
I am attempting to learn how to stack or combine or layer multiple images ontop of each other. Specifically to take all of the images of meteors taken throughout the…
blizzard aftereffects
This is the northeast wall of the roll off roof observatory. It gets the worst of the nor’easter storms and blizzards. Unfortunately the sheer force of the driving wind tends…