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…
allsky2 interesting imagery
Every morning over coffee we sit down and scan through the imagery from the two allsky cameras from overnight. This morning (2012 August 02) we got some really great surprises.…
New Sudden Ionospheric Disturbance (SID) receiver goes live
We recently received a SID receiver that will detect solar storms impacting the Earth’s Ionosphere. It consists of a coiled loop antenna, in our case oriented east-west, connected to the…
Allsky camera vs the wasps
We’ve noticed wasps attempting to build nests up against the outside housing of the allsky1 camera system. We’ve taken them down twice and just noticed more wasps congregating yet again.…
Repurposing an old pier
This is a solar radio telescope pier from the decommissioned Algonquin Radio Telescope site in Ontario. We picked it up a few years ago with the intent to stick a…
KAON Open House Saturday July 14th, 2012
The Kingston Astronomy Outreach Network (KAON) held an open house, lecture and public observing session on Saturday July 14th, 2012 from 21:00-22:30 EDT at the Queen’s University Ellis Hall Observatory.…
conjunction pleiades, jupiter, venus
On the morning of Sunday 2012 July 01 (Happy Canada Day!) we were up and outside at 04:00 to observe and photograph this conjuntion of the Pleiades star cluster, the…
July 4th, Happy Holidays to our friends to the south
It was a very restless sleep overnight, very hot and muggy. We got rain that we needed, and in the transient sleep I saw lighting flashes, strange squeels and the…
-8 magnitude Iridium flare
This is what a -8 magnitude Iridium flare looks like (brightest point in the south south east sky). Pretty neat and pretty bright. The brighter they are the shorter duration…
Telescope cover modifications
On the left was the existing state of the 20cm LX200gps of the RASC-KC. The wooden cover had to be slid off from left to right and then manually dropped…
Transit of Venus 2012 June 05
The Transit of Venus 2012 has come and gone. It was a great astronomical event. We had lots of equipment and things in general went well. Some preliminary images: Kim…