Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

This is Jupiter from the same morning as the Saturn post below. Tuesday 2022 July 26 at04:45 EDT or 08:45 UTC. Jupiter is at a much higher altitude than the last several years, and also much higher than Saturn. It is approaching its highest point but is competing against the rising brightness of the Sun.
The North Equatorial Belt (NEB) is narrow but dark in colour and contrast. No Great Red Spot is seen in this image but some smaller storms are seen on the NEB and the SEB.

This is an animation of all of the imaging runs from that night. The first two images in the run are only 30 second runs, resulting in only a thousand frames or so. There are two processed images of each frame, the best 10% and the best 25% of the run.
The processing workflow is:
firecapture .ser, autostakkert! v3 to png, registax wavelet processing, ImageMagick annotation and conversion to .gif and .mpg. Some dust spots are seen here as well.

Saturn is well placed in the morning sky after midnight, approaching opposition on 2022 August 14. At 01:00 EDT it will be at its highest altitude above the horizon, due south. Unfortunately Jupiter trails behind it, so by the time I am outside at 03:00 Saturn has already gone past its peak and has started to slip down into the west.

It is a compromise between planet positions and an astronomers ability to totally screw up their sleep cycles 🙂

This first image is my first of the evening, with incorrect settings 🙂 The gain on the camera was set much to high (normally I leave it alone, but it must have stuck from an earlier session). You can see the noise and the grain in the image. It was a 30 second run using the best 25% of 1453 frames.

The last image of the session is here below, the best 25% of 3833 frames with a much lower gain, much less noise and grain as a result.

My normal image processing routine has changed a little… in the past it went like this:
firecapture SER, PIPP AVI, autostakkert! v3 PNG, registax v6 wavelets, ImageMagick for annotation.
I was finding that PIPP was cropping well, but generating a file that was much larger than the original, even with substantial cropping. The benefit of cropping was to achieve a fixed pixel size image, ie 600×600, so that the annotation code could put text in the correct places around the target of the image.
I have reprogrammed the batch annotation scripts and so far they are working out with a variable size image. the new sequence of processing is:
firecapture SER, autostakkert! v3 PNG, registax v6 wavelets, ImageMagick for annotation.

Once finalized, the original source .SER video files (huge! tens of GBs!) are moved into an archive folder and every few months that archive folder is removed with the contents going to TWO external SATA drives, one primary, one backup, and put on shelves until needed next.

Saturn was up nicely in the morning, as was Jupiter. So the same was done for Jupiter… the image above with just the regular minimal information annotation and the image below, with the complete log file.

This is the SuperSID data from the X1.13 class solar flare that occurred on Tuesday 2022 May 03, peaking at 13:25 UTC (-4=09:25 EDT).
This is not too surprising as this SuperSID station monitors the ionosphere between southeastern Ontario and the coast of Maine, USA, to our east. The Sun was also away over to the east when this happened.
This is the new, still testing, graph produced with NOAA event annotations.

So it is *not* surprising that the RadioJOVE system did not capture the event, being outside of its detection area.

This was captured on the allsky camera system that we host from the University of Western Ontario, SCGO Allsky2, Southern Ontario Meteor Network (SOMN) UWO#10.

A bright fireball was observed by a network of all-sky cameras across southern Ontario at 11:37pm on Sunday, April 17, 2022 EDT (03:37 202 April 18 UTC).
Analysis of the video data suggests that fragments of the meteor are likely to have made it to the ground near the eastern shore of Lake Simcoe, just north of the town of Argyle.

This is the video captured by the system here:

meteors. Denis Vida, who specializes in the study of meteors, confirmed that more than a dozen all-sky cameras of Western’s Southern Ontario Meteor Network (SOMN) captured the event north of Toronto late Sunday evening as did a number of citizen
scientist-operated cameras from the Global Meteor Network (GMN).
“This fireball was particularly significant because it was moving slowly, was on an asteroidal orbit and ended very low in the atmosphere. These are all good indicators that material survived,” says Vida, an astronomy postdoctoral associate.

In fact, the fireball was still producing light at just 29 km altitude. Another factor which strongly favours survival of meteorites, includes the very steep entry angle (about 30 degrees from the vertical). “Taken together, these factors suggest many small meteorites have made it to the ground,” says Vida.

This event is equally important because Western’s meteor research group has good-quality video data of its passage through the atmosphere so they can calculate rock’s origin in our solar system. Preliminary results indicate that the fireball first became visible at an altitude of 90km and travelled almost due north.

Meteorite fall zone
“The initial mass is believed to have been around 10 kilograms and we would expect tens to hundreds of grams of material on the ground,” says Vida. “Meteorites are of great interest to researchers as studying them helps us to understand the formation and evolution of the solar system,” says Vida.

Meteorites can be recognized by their dark, often scalloped exterior. Usually they will be denser than a ‘normal’ rock and will often be attracted to a magnet due to their metal content. Meteorites are not dangerous, but if recovered, it is best to place them in a clean plastic bag or wrap them in aluminum foil. They should also be handled as little as possible to help preserve their scientific value. In Canada, meteorites belong to the owner of the land upon which they are found. If individuals plan to search, they should always obtain permission of the land-owner before venturing onto private land.

Researchers at Western and the Royal Ontario Museum are interested to hear from anyone in the area of the potential fall who may have heard anything unusual, or who may have found possible meteorites. If you believe you have found a suspicious rock from this event, please contact the Royal Ontario Museum at naturalhistory@rom.on.ca
Information related to the fireball or questions related to the camera data should be directed to Vida at dvida@uwo.ca
For interviews and all other media inquiries, please contact Jeff Renaud at 519-520-7281, jrenaud9@uwo.ca

MEDIA CONTACT: Jeff Renaud, Senior Media Relations Officer, 519-520-7281 (mobile), jrenaud9@uwo.ca
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