Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

Winter Solstice came by yesterday (Monday Dec 21, 2009) at 12:57pm EST. We did a little dance around the fire to celebrate… ok.. it was the BBQ. But we still did celebrate!

From Phil of the bad astronomy site:
“The winter solstice marks the longest night and shortest day of the year. However, it’s not when the Sun rises latest and sets earliest! The Earth has the unfortunate habit of orbiting the Sun in an ellipse, which screws things up a bit when it comes to timing.”

* The first real snow (that which stays overnight and into the next morning).
It snowed yesterday, last night and this morning. . A beautiful, clear and silent morning.

And also a sad one. We lost Norm Welbanks last night. Norm was a standup guy, a standup SkyGuy, who lost his fight early this morning.

Norm was an astronomer and a truck driver. Not sure which he did the most but it was pretty close. He stepped up to serve on the Board of the RASC Kingston Centre a few years back when he was needed and really enjoyed the public outreach side of what we do, showing the skies to newbies and talking about it.
We’ll miss you Norm!

Out again early Tuesday morning at 04:00 EST (09:00 UT) to look for Leonids. The skies were pristine but the air was cold.. about -5C.
stayed out for about 30 minutes, taking pictures until the camera batteries died out. The nickel metal hybrids are a lower voltage to start, about 2.62v when fully charged, as opposed to 3.15 for alkalines. Plus being out in the cold, they tend not to last as long as normal. Time to start thinking about building an external power pack for the camera for those long winters ahead.

In any event, Kim was out for over an hour and observed many more than 3 Leonids… counts to follow. I spotted about 3 in the course of 30 minutes. Again, no images on the camera but there should be some on the Allsky camera images, to be reviewed later today.

The leonid meteor shower peak is approaching quickly. We went out this morning and took a few images along the way. After about 30 minutes outside before dawn, we saw two and only two Leonid meteors but no images of them.

Here is a 64 second f2.6 exposure of Leo, Mars and M44 the Beehive Cluster.

And here is another of Orion and Sirius

The main peak(s) are expected to occur in the hours around 22h00 UT on November 17= 17h00 US Eastern, although variable activity may happen at almost any stage between November 16 and 18.

We spent a couple of hours last night researching how to remove the hot pixels from our ST237A allsky camera.

These are the bright spots on an image that are noise or hot pixels, that do not move during the night. As a result they can be confused with real stars and possibly other objects. So, while seeing if the linux imagemagick package we use to annotate the image had any other parameters and operations that could be used, we stumbled across:
-interlace none
This prevents imagemagic from creating a progressive JPG by default
-comment “copywrite StarlightCascade Observatory”
which puts it into the exif comment section
and finally
-noise radius (eg -noise 1)

Add or reduce noise in an image.
The principal function of noise peak elimination filter is to smooth the objects within an image without losing edge information and without creating undesired structures. The central idea of the algorithm is to replace a pixel with its next neighbor in value within a pixel window, if this pixel has been found to be noise. A pixel is defined as noise if and only if this pixel is a maximum or minimum within the pixel window.
Use -noise radius to specify the width of the neighborhood when reducing noise.
We used this on an image and got the following result:
The first image is from September 22nd at 05:45 am and is not processed for noise. The second images is from September 24th at 05:44am and is processed with -noise 1

The only issue now is to see if the -noise function will remove real data as well. We can go back in time and process some of the original “specials” and see how they react.

KAON (Kingston Astronomy Outreach Network) Public Observing Session.

*SPECIAL DATE* Saturday September 19th 6:30-11:00pm EDT Lake Ontario Park King Street West of Portsmouth Avenue in Kingston Ontario. (Sunset 19:09 EDT) A request to all RASC-KC members to come out with their telescopes for display, solar observing (if you have a filter), and stellar observing of Jupiter that evening. Rain or cloud or shine their will be a short talk in the pavilion. (Bring your own chairs for the talk).

Talks starting at 7:45pm in the Pavillion rain or shine.

If clear, solar observing starts at 6:30pm and stellar observing to start around 8:30pm. Special targets will be Jupiter and its moons along with Sagittarius and possibly Neptune.
Updated 20090921: Good night, good event, good turnout. See images at kingstoniya.ca

Driving out in the American midwest anytime to see things like Badlands National Park in South Dakota?

Or within a couple of hours to see this famous place from the movie North by Northwest with Cary Grant?

If so.. without any doubts whatsoever, drive another couple of hours to see this wonderful place as seen in Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind (Devils Tower Wyoming. Maybe an hour off the Interstate but has a very nice State Campground. Whatever you do, get up early and go for the walk around the tower base).