This is a short 480p video that shows the issue with this donated telescope.
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Archive for astronomy
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A great big thank you to Malcolm for his imaging of Minor Planet (10062) kimhay last night… from Chile!
12 x 600s exposures TEC140 at 1024mm focal length, f/7 with Moravian 16803 CCD and Luminance filter.
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2023 ended with 55 observatory imaging sessions, slightly above the goal of 50 set one year ago. The goal this year is 60 imaging sessions.
2024 started well Monday evening in the cold with a Jupiter imaging session.
seeing was average, transparency was poor, best focus really wasn’t great.
The next piece of kit is looking more and more like a rack and pinion remote focuser that is ascom capable, so that sharpcap can do the focus itself. For this shot I ROI’d into Europa and Io and ramped up the gain and exposure and focussed on them. Then back to the 800×800 pixels that I normally aim for.
I am also trying out not to autostakkert! drizzle x1.5 as yes, the images get bigger by interpolated pixels, but they are also softer and more out of focus looking.
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Above/left is the night of Dec 12/13
Below is the SCGO Allsky2/UWO10 camera system meteor detection summary image showing 57 events of Dec 13/14.
This system is designed for fireballs and does not detect dimmer meteors that humans can often see.
North is up, East is left
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SuperSID receiver
The SCGO Supersid system has been running since 2016. For the first few years it ran on a windows computer with windows supersid software.
This 2023 spring we moved to a raspberry pi computer and Supersid software by Steve Berl.
We are still working on it to confirm that it is in fact functioning. The behaviour and data that comes out of it is different than in years past.
So, we are in the process of crating a checklist to run monthly to ensure the system is up and running and behaving properly.
One of those items we tested yesterday was to disconnect the coax antenna feed from the 24 loop 2m directional antenna to the supersid receiver. We left it unplugged for approx 90 minutes and then inspected the data log file and the graph.
The signal did in fact drop to near zero levels during the disconnect and then came back again after a reconnect, with the times matching.
So that shows us to a good degree of certainty that the antenna is in fact connected 🙂
supersid 2m loop antenna
NAA is the only reliable station we receive but we may have the software configuration messed up.. another thing to cross check with others.. soon!
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Jupiter 2023Nov24
Nov27
It was a busy busy Friday evening.. what with it being the only clear night for the next week or so.
The new ZWO miniscope was mounted to the Vixen scope and a ZWO ASI120 camera was mounted to it. It is a USB3 camera but I have only USB2 available to it. So it connected to a USB2 hub that also had connected to the usb-serial adapter for the mount and the usb focuser. Firecapture needed to be told to allow more than one instance and then restarted. It also needed to be installed again in a different location to get a 2nd camera up. It worked initially enough to find the moon and work on the miniscope to focus.
Once that was done however, any attempt at getting two cameras working failed. the miniscope camera failed to work.
I then started up sharpcap and tried to connect with it.. again.. no response.
All of this in lead up to Saturn transitting and Jupiter moon and shadow transits.
This is one of the best of 40+ imaging runs that ran from 18:00-21:36 … and it got too cold for me to continue. I had to stay outside as I was still trying to manage cables and get the finder camera working.
I’ve switched over from a x2 barlow to a x1.5 barlow, increasing exposure speed and contrast
2.3ms exposures help to compensate for seeing and air movement. This image shows the moon Ganymede off to the lower right, after completing its transfer. On Jupiter itself is the shadow of Ganymede, transitting at the bottom. Jupiter was 57 degrees in altitude but the very bright moon was very nearby, making transparency worse. This was the best 10% of 10K frames. The GRS also makes an appearance up and to the right of the moon shadow.
This was taken with firecapture and processed normally with autostakkert and registax.
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(20021) Kevinkell = 1991 VM6
Discovery: 1991-11-06 / E. W. Elst / La Silla / 809
Kevin Kell (b. 1963) is a Canadian amateur astronomer who has served RASC Kingston Centre
as President, Secretary, Treasurer, Equipment Loan Coordinator and editor of Regulus, the club’s newsletter. The club awarded him the A. Vibert Douglas Award, he won the RASC Service Award, and also contributes to the AAVSO and the British Astronomical Association.
[Ref: WGSBN Bull. 3, #15]
https://minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/show_object?object_id=20021
https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=20021
See also Kim’s Minor Planet from two years ago:
https://starlightcascade.ca/blog/2021/11/minor-planet-10062-kimhay/
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This image was taken just after maximum eclipse. Serendipitously an aircraft flew right over it.
We missed the actual aircraft part but we did catch the contrails left by its engines.
Another person onsite on the sidewalk of Ellis Hall at Queens University in Kingston had a video that did capture the aircraft.
There are two visible sunspots and it was a very very cloudy day. We were lucky to see what we did of the event.
Perhaps 100 people attended with volunteers from RASC Kingston of Devon, Laurie, Susan, Kim and Kevin.
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The best of this mornings imaging run of Jupiter. The best 5% which also shows Europa in the upper left and the great red spot as well.
The latest animated gif of the mornings run of Jupiter imaging.
It is comprised of a combined best of 5% and 10% of the images, to show the difference quality between the two and over time.
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From later in the morning on Monday. Jupiter was almost overhead… 60 degrees of altitude!
very little if any atmospheric dispersion in colouring but still not absolutely clear or steady.
No great Red Spot in this image but the moon Io can barely be made out to the right side.
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Jupiter? 20230827
Aug30
This is Jupiter believe it or not.
This is in the middle of a run of approx 10 runs that were batch processed in Autostakkert! v3 and is the only run that shows this really really weird artefact pattern.
I have yet to reprocess this one individually. It is going to be really interesting to see how it turns out.
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Jupiter later the same morning as the previous Saturn post.
Still not really great… I am still trying to recreate the 2016 ultracrisp seeing images that I took.
This shows Jupiter and the Great Red Spot.. which is not nearly so Great anymore.. still shrinking and loosing colour contrast.
This is the best 10% of 10K frames, each exposed at 10ms
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One of the first times that I can remember that I have been able to image a planet at opposition. In theory this would be the closest and best time to image.
This is Saturn from Sunday morning around 01:23 EDT (05:23 UTC-4)
details are annotated on the image so I won’t repeat a lot of those. In short this was the best 10% of 6700 frames each exposed for 36ms.
One of my best Saturns I think. Always looking to make it better though.
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Jupiter 20230724
Jul25
Attached is the best image of Jupiter from Monday morning’s imaging session.
Details are annotated onto the bottom of the image but just in case:
Processed with firecapture, autostakkert! registax! and ImageMagick
Best 5% of 11K frames of 7ms each, colour balanced, only 46 deg altitude.
Used a x2 barlow, UV/IR cut filter and the new ASI585MC camera.
Depending on your display you may or may not see the moon Europa in the upper right corner
The GRS is on the lower left of Jupiter… hard to make out
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It has been a month or more? since the last clear morning skies that also worked with my schedule. Monday morning was nice!
Details are annotated onto the bottom of the image but just in case:
Processed with firecapture, autostakkert! registax! and ImageMagick
Best 10% of 4400 frames of 40ms each, colour balanced, only 33 deg altitude.. looking through a lot of air!
Definitely thinking about getting an ADC to correct the colour abberations (blue on top red on bottom) of the image.
Used a x2 barlow, UV/IR cut filter and the new ASI585MC camera.
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