Telescope Repair
The main telescope Kim uses for solar observing is a Bausch & Lomb 4000 Schmidt-Cass. She uses it to make daily (if at all possible) observations of sunspots with a…
weekend notes
GLOBE at Night: encourages citizen-scientists worldwide to record the brightness of the night sky. During 2 weeks of moonless evenings, children and adults match the appearance of a constellation (Leo…
RASC Kingston
The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada – Kingston Centre, had its regular monthly meeting Friday March 11th, 2011 at 7:30pm in Stirling Hall Theatre A, 64 Bader Lane on Queen’s…
Discovery/ISS Pass#2
The Space Shuttle Discovery and the international Space Station on the evening of Tuesday March 8th on a low 30 degree pass in the west, southwest and south. All images…
Discovery/ISS Pass
While waiting for the Space Shuttle and ISS to pass over, we saw this awesome display of the crescent moon and Jupiter low in the western skies: The Space Shuttle…
ISS Passes upcoming
The space shuttle discovery is currently docked with the International Space Station and has been passing overhead our area for the last few days. Coming up soon will be a…
Welcome to March
Kim was up before Sunrise and took this image of the crescent Moon and Venus in the south east, just over Kingston. It was gorgeous. This newer camera is definitely…
allsky image processing changes
We’ve noticed for the last few months that the images coming out of the allsky camera were dimmer and lower contrast than previous images. So after a couple of hours…
seti@home issues
The seti@home project has been quite a lot the last few weeks and as a result we went out and added in a 2nd project to most of the computers…
catching up
It’s been busy the last couple of weeks: * Snow and more snow. The Great Groundhog Day Blizzard hit on Feb 2nd and left us with a pile. * WordPress…
allsky laptop2
The original 7 year old laptop suffered a complete hard drive failure some days back and we have just acquired another, slightly newer laptop, only 6 years old :).. hmm…
Supernova!
Congratulations to Kathryn Gray on her discovery of Supernovae SN2010lt in UGC 3378 (imaged on December 31, 2010 and discovered on January 2, 2011 and confirmed on IAU Electronic Telegram…
outdoor laptop
There seems to be a fine line of what exactly you can do with a laptop in the outdoors in the winter. The replacement allsky computer was outside the first…
the story of moving an imaging system
Tuesday night we spent about 3 hours transferring the allsky camera workstation setup from a desktop machine to an old laptop machine. One reason was that a desktop machine was…
Allsky down for upgrades
The allsky camera workstation has been removed from service and a new replacement system is being setup using a laptop. The old workstation was an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ running…