RASC-Kingston Centre season start
The first meeting of the season for The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada – Kingston Centre, was held Monday evening September 17th, 2012 from 7-9pm in Ellis Hall Room 324…
Fall’N’Stars 2012
This was our 13th annual Fall’N’Stars Star Party (including the inaugural DSNOS). We’ve been at the Boy Scout Camp Sagonaska for 12 years now. The Event started on Friday September…
KAON Report Saturday September 8th 2012
Last night was the first Kingston Astronomy Outreach Network (KAON) of the new season. It is the last running in the summer hours of 9-10:30pm and the October 13th open…
CHDK strikes again
2012sept09 CHDK is a firmware enhancement that operates on a number of Canon Cameras. In particular our older A540 model is one of those and in the last few years…
Nice meteor last night!
I was outside taking some images with our old Canon Powershot A540 camera on a tripod, testing out its new CHDK software, and saw a wonderfully slow, bright, yellow/orange meteor…
How to build an observatory – part2
Project steps in approximate order needed to complete by end of August 2012 xxx make that September 8th, 2012. Life gets in the way of hobbies… always has always will.…
allsky1 camera system laptop failure
The laptop computer that runs the SCO allsky1 camera had a hard drive failure (exacerbated by all of the heat I suspect… will have to put more exhaust fans into…
How to build a new Observatory
We are building a new roll off building observatory for a large telescope. The concept was that this would be a quick and dirty, smallest footprint possible and low cost…
stellar planetary conjunction
The RASC Observers Calendar has notable events listed in its pages. Not accessible at all unless you purchase the calendar but perhaps one year, it will be. For Tuesday August…
Lennox and Addington Dark Sky Viewing Area
We visited the Sheffield Lake Conservation area on Sunday (2012 August 19) to do some canoeing and to see the Lennox and Addington Dark Sky Viewing Area 30 minutes north…
A trip to Point Petre
In July 2012 we were in the neighbourhood of Point Petre, the sourthernmost portion of Prince Edward County, near Sandbanks Provincial Park. At one time we were considering using it…
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…
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…