Spring has sprung

Mar20
by kim hay on March 20, 2009 at 18:05
Posted In: Uncategorized

At 7:44 am 11:44 UT  Spring officially came, and asked Old man winter to leave.  The skies were clear and the moon hung in the SE like a Christmas tree ornament.  Though the temperatures were cool all day at 4C, the wind was from the North, making it cool, and a reminder that winter doesn’t want to leave.

Many errands were ran, and the rest of the afternoon was ours.  The new coldframe was put together and placed in the 3rd raised bed garden. The two coldframes on the south side of the greenhouse was planted with Artic King and Rouge Hivre lettuce seed.  The greenhouse was filled with seedelings and the heat was put on to keep them warm.  On Saturday, the rest of the peppers (though late) and tomatoes and flowers will be planted. Kevin plans on fixing the roof.  It feels so good and exciting to have the seedlings come up and grow, the change of a season, the turning of the tide, the anticipation of gardening adventures.

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Gardening with Ed Lawrence

Mar18
by kevin on March 18, 2009 at 09:09 and modified on March 18, 2009. at 09:09
Posted In: gardening

Last Thursday March 12th, we attended a lecture by
Ed Lawrence, a master gardener with a regular call-in program on CBC Radio. Maybe 30-35 minutes of the time was spent on general background on the ontario cosmetic pesticide ban and the next 90 minutes or so on Q&A from the audience.

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ISS

Mar18
by kevin on March 18, 2009 at 08:35 and modified on March 18, 2009. at 09:09
Posted In: astronomy

sco-20090316_2051_23fit
sco-20090316_2053_34fit

The International Space Station made a very high pass Monday night (2009 March 16) and we captured it on two images from the allsky camera.
The maximum altitude was 81 degrees and the estimated magnitude from heavens-above.com was -2.3.
The camera picked them up with no problem. Each exposure was 120 seconds long with about a 20-30 second gap while the firsti mage was downloading from the camera.

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The Lunar Werner X

Mar04
by kevin on March 4, 2009 at 19:13 and modified on March 15, 2013. at 10:58
Posted In: astronomy

2009 Observing Last Night Overall I found that the 5/4″ eyepieces on the 90mm Meade were a lot easier to hold the camera up to the eyepiece and snap off images (than the 2″ eyepieces). I was using a 25mm plossl (about x36 I think), 1/1000sec exposures and the camera on continuous motor drive as it were… Starting with wide angle and then zooming in to x4 on the camera optics and changing the exposure
up to 1/125 sec we had 100 images before you could shake a stick… good
thing too.. clouds came in and it was cold and Rick Mercer was about to
come on.

Then the cool thing happened… reviewing the images inside and
noticed a neat feature lit up on the moon… in the shape of an X

Cool! It looks like the Lunar X feature that was imaged without even
hunting for it! (see RASC Journal April 2007). Attached are two small
images.. one wide angle and the other heavily cropped…
Here they are:
img_4033v800

img_4033vx800

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Comet Lulin

Feb21
by kevin on February 21, 2009 at 13:53 and modified on March 15, 2013. at 10:57
Posted In: astronomy

2009 We were up very early this morning taking our last look at Comet Lulin for a couple of days… snow on the way…
Here is a 15 second exposure from our Canon camera.
20090221-16b-600
All labels are to the immediate right of the named object. The comet is very very faint (Magnitude 5-6).
Click on the image for a larger version.

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rain

Feb19
by kevin on February 19, 2009 at 09:52 and modified on February 19, 2009. at 09:55
Posted In: gardening, weather

Just came back from a Lennox & Addington Horticultural Society meeting wondering about precipitation… so off to The Weather Network to mine their historical data for Kingston Ontario.
The results are here in a handy PDF file with graphs for the June-Sept growing season.

We have similar data for our own area, which does have a different climate than Kingston does, but that is a project for another day.

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New scope on display

Feb13
by kevin on February 13, 2009 at 15:14 and modified on February 16, 2009. at 12:32
Posted In: astronomy

This is our new Meade DS90 refractor on display at the last months Public Observing Session.
20090110-04
The finder battery died pretty quick so we are waiting to replace that before trying out some more testing.
20090110-02

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Busy weekend

Feb09
by kevin on February 9, 2009 at 14:22 and modified on March 15, 2013. at 10:57
Posted In: astronomy, gardening, Science Fiction, tech

2009 We look so forward to weekends to escape the mind numbing stressful workplace… and then are so busy trying to do some of the items we want to do and the things that we are doing for others, that come Monday morning you look around and say.. what happened?
Case in point:

  • Finished modifying the display case shelving.. now have to find the meteorites to display.
  • Got the images from past Kingston IYA events posted and looking for more to add.
  • Got the Roboscope systems back up and running and communicating with the dome, the telescope, the webcam and the CCD camera. Even updated the Digital Domeworks software from v4 to v5.1. Tried out an hour or so of operational testing and failed 🙁 Need more time in the daylight with warmer weather.
  • Set up wordpress as the default web content manager for the KHSS (Kingston Heirloom Seeds Savers).. now all we need are some members to start posting.
  • spent the better part of 8 hours over the weekend at work, upgrading the 8 year old hardware (Intel Pentium 4’s running at 1.8GHz, 512mb SDRAM, 20gb IDE Boot drives) running two of the servers over to five year old hardware (AMD Athlon XP2500+ at 1.83GHz, 1024mb DDRAM, 80gb IDE boot drives).
    Performance is noticeably faster as is the heat output. The Kill-a-Watt power meter shows these starting up at 165 watts and settling down to 125 watts running.

  • Comet Lulin … it cleared just enough this morning around 05:30, that we were able to go out and convince ourselves that we saw Comet Lulin in binoculars amongst the cloud and haze. Look for closest approach on Tuesday Feb 23rd near the planet Saturn in Leo.
  • Battlestar Galactica… managed to stay awake after another very long day on Friday and watch the whole episode.. very good. So long “old” Apollo.. it was good to see you again. Friday February 13th 7:30pm RASC-Kingston Centre Regular Meeting

    at Stirling Hall Theatre A, Bader Lane, Queen’s University Dr Gregg Wade (RMC) will speak on recent “Large Programs” that have been established at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
    These are really exciting, and range from a census of the Virgo cluster to
    detailed mapping of individual stars. One of the four Large Programs is his own project called MiMeS, which is about stellar magnetism.

    Saturday February 14 2009, 7:30pm: The KAON (Kingston Astronomy Outreach Network) Public Observing Session Queen’s University Ellis Hall Observatory

    Feature IYA Talk by Susan Gagnon “How Has Galileo’s Scope Evolved?”
    If the weather permits there will be telescopes out on the Observing Deck.

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    ground hog day + 1

    Feb03
    by kevin on February 3, 2009 at 09:15 and modified on February 3, 2009. at 09:21
    Posted In: Uncategorized

    A lot of little catch up items .. groundhog day was yesterday and with groundhogs only at 39% with their predictions, at least the big 3 all agreed on seeing shadow and more winter coming.
    We of course watched Groundhog Day.. an annual tradition.

    The snowblower went out twice in the last week, clearing out over 50 cm… at least we can get to the greenhouse and observatory now.

    The KAON400 (Kingston Astronomy Outreach Network) kickoff event on January 10th went well as described earlier. The guest speaker kickoff at RMC had a hiccup or two… a widespread power outage the afternoon and night of the talk on Tuesday… during a blizzard…
    so it was rescheduled for Wednesday and everything went well.
    Dr. Sara Seagher spoke on extrasolar planets and methods of detecting them.

    We have wondered for some time what an LCD monitor placed out in the observatory would do.. and if it would hold out… and so far it has been out for 3 weeks and is doing wonderfully…despite -10, -15 and -20C temps.
    20090101-079-moon

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    IYA Kickoff1

    Jan20
    by kevin on January 20, 2009 at 12:19 and modified on October 21, 2010. at 09:57
    Posted In: astronomy, Science Fiction

    On the evening of Friday January 9th, 2009 the RASC-Kingston Centre held an International Year of Astronomy kickoff lecture in Stirling Hall.
    20090110-01b
    The very next night we held a public observing session at the Queen’s University Ellis Hall Observatory but got clouded out. As a kickoff event we had a talk on Galileo by Dr. Judith Irwin with a visit from Galileo and Cardinal Barberini 20090110-20b
    Along with our Kingston City Mayor Harvey Rosen reading the City Proclamation of IYA Kickoff Week.
    20090110-25b

    We closed out the kickoff week with a talk by Dr. Sara Seagher (MIT) on Exoplanets at the Royal Military College Currie Hall, a day after originally scheduled due to a widespread power outage.20090114-09b1

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    BSG returns tonight!

    Jan16
    by kevin on January 16, 2009 at 14:02 and modified on January 16, 2009. at 14:03
    Posted In: Science Fiction

    bsg
    I don’t know about you, but we are going to settle down in front of a large warm fire, with a nice warm pizza with a lot of nice warm cats and going to watch the HOT HOT HOT debut of this latest and last season of Battlestar Galactica! The Spacecast channel here in Canada has been running the first 10 episodes of the current season all day long and there are several specials tonight as well, before the big event at 10pm EST. Here’s hoping that the nuclear devastation we saw at the end of the last episode was really a big dream sequence!

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    IYA 2009

    Jan07
    by kevin on January 7, 2009 at 12:38 and modified on January 7, 2009. at 12:40
    Posted In: astronomy

    And of course this is the International Year of Astronomy! iya_logo_small
    Check out the local Kingston effort at kingstoniya.ca, bringing together the Royal Military College, Queen’s University and The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada – Kingston Centre.
    Another 3 hours spent organizing last night for our kickoff week starting on Friday January 9th. The City of Kingston Council proclaimed the IYA for us last night as well. Pretty Cool.
    Saturday the 10th is another big day and we close off the week with a talk on Tuesday the 13th. You can see the Canadian IYA site as well.

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