Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

With the installation of a custom metal adapter, the moonlight focuser is now mounted to the Vixen VC200L cassegrain scope. The old focuser was disconnected from power and remains in place.

Saturday morning around 03:30 was the first attempt at first light with the new setup… and one the very first slew, what with new equipment, new mounts, new cables… a cable caught, stopped the mount cold and thank goodness for clutches!

it was late.. the stars had gone already, so no realignment. I told the mount to park.. and of course it parked 30-40 degrees offtarget. I had thought it would know where that is from the encoders.. guess not. slipped the clutch, pointed it roughly north, at least so the building would clear when rolling on and shut down.

Saturday evening was the next chance .. 22:30 was finally dark enough to see some stars to do an alignment. It picked Arcturus… in the south! I only ever remember Arcturus in the east or west.. never south! I used the telrad to find it.. it was 30-50 degrees away. Drove it there with the hand controller until centered in the telrad 1/2 degree circle.

It was in the findercamera FOV. Used the virtual handcontroller to get Arcturus in the center of the prime camera. The next star was Vega. Did the same for that. Successful align! I remember to do only 2 star rather than 3 star… 2 star seems more reliable to be sure.

Parked the scope, powered down, powered up, goto the moon. It went to the moon!

Yay! The mosquitos were swarming saturday night so I did 23 quick 15 second runs on the moon, trying to get all of it to make a mosaic. The camera was not at 90 degrees to the terminator, so getting a grid was difficult. I thought I had it.

This morning I ran all 23 through Autostakkert and went outside to do yardwork.

After that was completed using the best 25% of the frames, I discovered the method to do batch processing of wavelets in Registax. And it worked! That saved a *lot* of mouse clicks and time. Again. Set it to run, go away and come back in an hour and they are done.

The last step was to put these 23 frames into MS Image Composite Editor and away it went. This is the result (reduced in pixels from 10kx10k to 1024×768)

As you can see, I missed one grid portion 🙁 so sad!

Two other sections have green artefacts and two sections you can see the borders.

unsure why that happened but as always… practice practice practice!

Oh well. More cable management with velcro and things are coming together.

Science Rendezvous Kingston is an educational outreach event led by Queen’s University. This year again it was held in the downtown area, recently renamed to the Slush Puppy Place, on Saturday 2024 May 11th.

“Southeastern Ontario’s largest free family science fair is back on Saturday, May 11, and organizers are busily readying Slush Puppie Place in Kingston to host thousands of parents and children.
Science Rendezvous Kingston’s theme this year is “Innovate,” and there will be no shortage of demonstrations of Canadian innovation on display inside and outside Kingston’s prominent downtown stadium venue. ”

More than 5,300 individuals attended the event in 2023, which was facilitated by 430 volunteers. Last year’s Science Rendezvous won the Steam Green award from its national parent organization, in recognition of some of the special environmental and cultural projects that the Science Rendezvous Kingston crew produced that year.

The RASC Kingston Centre had 8 volunteers this year and I would like to thank them all for a great outreach event!
We ran out of many handouts including stickers, space cards and colouring handouts.
The event was opened by the Award winning Kingston Town Crier, Chris Whyman and also some words from politicians 🙁

We had four solar telescopes that people could look through or see on the projected display.

The attendance was amazing!

This website was brought to our attention and it a great aid in planning to image minor planets!

https://doncarona.tamu.edu/apps/minorbody/opposition/

https://kingston.rasc.ca/asteroids
The following RASC-KC members and past members who have had Minor Planets named after them for their contributions to astronomy, as well as those related to Kingston and Queen’s University

14 Upcoming oppositions (the best time to image) sorted by date

20240616 minor planet 3269 vibert-douglas at opposition mag 17.5
20240708 minor planet 3673 levy at opposition mag 16.5
20240710 minor planet 20022 dontown at opposition mag 19.6
20240716 minor planet 9070 ensab at opposition mag 16.9
20240903 minor planet 20021 kevinkell at opposition mag 17.5
20241011 minor planet 273987 greggwade at opposition mag 21.4
20241024 minor planet 5272 dickinson at opposition mag 16.0
20241028 minor planet 6115 martinduncan at opposition mag 15.7
20241219 minor planet 5457 queen’s at opposition mag 16.5
20250126 minor planet 10062 kimhay at opposition mag 18.3
20250221 minor planet 10076 rogerhill at opposition mag 18.7
20250228 minor planet 5424 covington at opposition mag 16.0
20250507 minor planet 10065 greglisk at opposition mag 16.7
20250721 minor planet 22426 mikehanes at opposition mag 18.5

For those that have to deal with clouds interfering with visual astronomy, we have some words for you: Radio Astronomy!
Our Radiojove telescope system was up and running during the Total Solar Eclipse over Yarker Ontario on 2024 April 8th.
The first image below is from first to last contact (approx 18:09-20:34 UTC).
There is a very slight decrease around 19:53.

The next one is for the time of totality only (approx 19:18-19:26 UTC). The single short duration spike is likely an ionospheric radio probe.

As a comparator that the system is in fact working, here is a daily plot from April 8th:

Last night was the first opportunity in some days to do some more work on the mount.

Previously I had raised the mount adapter by 2cm and also… forgot to lock down the roll-off building on one of those really windy nights this past week.

The building moved.. slammed into the scope, and moved stuff.

So… removed the camera, remove the barlow, remove the diagonal, insert the svbony 0.5x focal reducing lens filter adapter and put the camera back in.

Ran it over to Sirius to focus. OK. Park and shut down in the home position (should be 0 deg 0hr) start up, run sharpcap Pro Tools; polar alignment;

Polaris is in the FOV but too bright and the focal reducer is so bad the star is spread out and wiping out any chance of other stars being identified and plate solved. I ran the gain and exposure through many combinations but nothing! So sez my brain… if not the main scope how about the finder? It was aligned with the main scope earlier!

So.. that is what I did. Sharpcap and the 8×50 finder with the ASI120 camera did in fact work, plate solve and everything. I rotated the mount 90 deg in RA and sharpcap told me how very very bad the polar alignment was. Seeing the numbers on the screen I moved the mount up and down and left and right, waiting 3-6 seconds for the next image to update, and got it down to what I think was pretty excellent alignment… for a finderscope 🙂

Total Error 1 minute 26 sec

Then very carefully and very slowly were the RA and Dec nuts tightened… and the error reading did not change.

So my understanding of stuff is that the 3 star alignment dictates how good the pointing is and the polar alignment dictates how good the tracking is.

My last run I noted the tracking was very bad (I think after the building hit the mount in the wind). Last night however the tracking was … very good!

In 180 seconds I did not have to adjust the tracking at all and at the end it was still very close to where it started!

I did not have a chance to do a 3 star align after the fiddling around.. that is next time.

So.. back to Jupiter… seeing was poot, transparency was poor. Not a lot of detail or contrast at all. exposure time was higher than normal at 4ms. That tells me that I am looking through more air as Jupiter continues to drop and possibly through worse quality air as well. Airmass of 2.05 !!!

Oh! I did insert the IR cut filter for Jupiter… I have not yet determined if that changes the exposure by how much yet… another test for the future!

Best 10% of 20K frames, altitude only 29 degrees.

NEXT TIME on Survivor! Err.. Serenity Imaging!

3 star align!

pointing test!

tracking test!

exposure with and without the IR cut filter test!

oh look… Jupiter is gone for the season! 🙂

Planetary Imaging during a RASCKC monthly meeting. I love it!

This was from the evening of Wednesday 2024 Feb14th and seeing and transparency seemed to be almost dare I say above average. I was out from 18:38 ET to 20:48 ET. The 2nd half of the session got worse… high cloud cover coming in. And this with the partial phase moon very nearby!

This is the best 5% of 15k frames of 2.5ms each in a 180second run. Jupiter keeps getting smaller.. now only 38 arcseconds across.

The moon Europa is just starting to transit Jupiter in the lower left and the Great Red Spot is showing nicely.

Without looking in detail, I feel this is the best session of the year (this is #2024-05).

An unusual sequence of events occurred with Jupiter and its moons on the evening of Monday 2024 January 29th.
The moon Europa moving right to left, disappeared in behind Jupiter. A while Later the moon Io came out from behind Jupiter, but not from behind the limb but from the shadow of Jupiter.
Next comes Europa coming out from the disk… and then a short time later disappearing into Jupiters shadow! Fun!
I have never seen or imaged this. As Luck would have it, Monday was only the 2nd clear evening in January…
So what follows are a few of the better images showing the events, from a 42 run session.

Europa disappearing behind Jupiter Io is behind the planet already at this point 20240130-0022UTC.

Io reappears from shadow At 02:42 UTC The moon Io comes out of Jupiters shadow.

Europa appears from Jupiters Limb at 03:08UTC is an image of the moon Europa appearing from behind Jupiters limb. Io is still seen as well.

Europa goes into shadow At 03:19UTC Europa goes into Jupiters shadow.

Too bad I could not stay up longer to capture Europas reappearance out of the shadow. But all in all it was great to be outside again. Lastly is an animated .gif for all 40 or so of the frames:

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.