1st Observing Session of 2022
This morning at 04:10 I got up (slowly and painfully) and went out to do my first imaging session of 2022, yep… Dec 11th was the last one. Venus, Saturn…
X1.3 solar flare at 17:39 UTC 2022 March 30
There were 17 solar flares yesterday, mostly C Class and a couple of M class… Today was this stupendous but short lived X1.3 class Solar Flare from Active Region AR12975……
Canadian SF
It is rare these days to discover a new author (even if they themselves have been around for some time), and even moreso if they are or were Canadian. From…
Astroberry Testbed
The astroberry 4.04 install image was downloaded (about 4GB, 8GB uncompressed) and successfully installed on a 32GB microsd card. That went into the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and ran! The…
It’s been cold out eh?
Today’s weather station temperature plot. It’s been so cold at times the station data is not received… we think it might be the cold affecting the batteries.. but then why…
Jupiter 2021 December 22
The workflow process is slowly changing over time. Now I tend to do a full view overexposed capture to establish orientation of the moons of Jupiter, to math it up…
Jupiter 2021Dec12
Seeing was NOT DISGUSTING this evening… merely poor! The following three images are the best 5%, 10% and 25% of 1340 frames with autostakkert3! in a 30 second run. This…
Jupiter 2021Dec05
seeing = 1 = DISGUSTING Initial image full res wide view overexposed to confirm moon orientation no barlow. Ganymede further out on left, Europa closer in on right then to…
Jupiter 2021Dec03
Working through the troubleshooting still. Much hardness in troubleshooting as seeing is 1=DISGUSTING. uninstalled firecapture completely. reinstalled from scratch into new location. Always have the debayer option ON. That seems…
Jupiter 2021Nov23
More commissioning attempts at solving the bad colour. This is the results of processing 39 runs (more actually, some were very bad and not included) through PIPP (.ser to .avi…
Jupiter 2021Nov22
Profile=Jupiter Diameter=39.25″ Magnitude=-2.35 Altitude=29.35° Airmass=2.04 CMI=19.4° CMII=182.6° CMIII=31.3° (during mid of capture) This is the last image of the night’s run… still needs collimating.. and the colour issue still needs…
collimate! collimate! collimate!
Telescope optics tend to be a finicky and complex issue at times. Mirrors tend to be finished down to fractions of a wavelength of light across the mirror surface to…
Jupiter 2021Nov19
After doing the barlow test, I moved ahead to try Jupiter out again… with the max x3 barlow (which turned out to have dust spots, so it too is now…
Telescope barlow focuser relationship
I did a short experiment last night with barlows and focussing distances. The results baffle me so I am going to have to try it again. As a general rule…
Partial Lunar Eclipse 2021 Nov 19
The first lunar eclipse in some time, partial or total. Of course the clouds came for the event! Up at 02:00 Local, 03:00 local, 04:00 local.. cloud Finally around 04:30…