We are learning of many new things online, and especially from Country View Acres on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/@CountryViewAcres
In particular… more and better grow lights for starting seeds. So we picked up this package last month
“Barrina Grow Lights for Indoor Plants, Full Spectrum LED Grow Light, 2ft 80W (8 x 10W, 500W Equivalent), T5 Grow Light Strip for Greenhouse, Plant Grow Light, Easy Installation, 8-Pack
from amazon.ca and just recently installed it on a 4 shelf metal stand that we use for plants.
Full Spectrum (Pinkish White Color) – Barrina T5 grow lights 2ft provide indoor plants with full-spectrum sunlight replacement.
Super Bright and High PPFD- Consuming only 80W with 400 LEDS totally, replace 500W general plant lights. ”
Time will tell but more light should get more germination.
Jupiter 20250109
This was the single best imaging run of 36 runs on a cold evening.
The shadow transit is from Io, the top right moon is Ganymede. Io itself is on the surface of the planet, not easily visible.
Seeing was poor, transparency was poor, and a more than quarter moon was nearby.
Exposures were about 2ms and this was the best 15% of 15k frames. The workflow was: firecapture, autostakkert!, registax, imagemagick, gimp. Not included here is the further processing using winjupos. That will come along shortly.
Below is an animation of the 36 runs of 180 seconds each, totalling 108 minutes
and after even yet more time processing… this is the result of running 36 imaging runs through winjupos to derotate. It was also put back through gimp for black levels, colour saturation and unsharp process (right image).. the left image is the closest timestamped image before winjupos processing.
These results are inconclusive regarding better signal to noise and a better image.
Some images of Mars….
2024July, 2024 August with the Vixen VC200L
2024 October
and last night 2025Jan09 with the Celestron C9.25
also included is the Sky&Tel Mars simulator showing topographical features
All with x1.5 barlow
Overall I am Squeeeee! ing (with joy) all over the place over last nights latest image!
Seeing was poor, transparency was poor and there was that large honkin moon still up in the east as well. Mars was only 37 degrees up over the horizon.
It will only get better! (no moon, higher Mars, better seeing and transparency)
We are looking at Chryse in the middle of the planet, Solis Lacus a little to the lower left, Sinus Meridani to the right . The Tharsis region to the upper left.
New standard workflow: firecapture, autostakkert!, regixtax, gimp, imagemagick
Now to start work on the Jupiter run and try out using WinJupOS on a run of 36 .
We have a new-to-us Celestron C9.25 Schmidt-Cassegrain OTA and as everyone knows, the front corrector plates on SCT’s are extremely prone to dew. So we have had an external strap heater around the front end (image c925a.jpg).
Unfortunately this strap heater moves around, comes loose, prevents the metal cap from going on, and makes it very difficult to add in the foam dew shield. So we got the Celestron Dew Heater Ring, which mounts on the inside.
Step 1: add a paper safety on the glass (image c925b.jpg)
Step 2: remove the six Phillips head screws
Step 3: remove the existing ring, the gasket underneath
Step 4: install the dew heater ring, adjusted so the power cable is near the 7’oclock position and put the screws back in.
Step 5: run the cables into the cable holder which clips on the edge.
Step 6: Bob’s Your Uncle.
Previous to the work, I watched THREE youtube videos on the process to make me an expert:
and my favourite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2blj_PDthcI
All three video demos went smoothly and the job was done in less than 5 minutes.
I made it to step 2. Step 3, removing the ring and gasket, totally failed. After 20 minutes of trying to pry out the ring without touching the glass (or breaking the glass!!!!) I stopped, reversed and put it all back together again.
I am suspecting that maybe it was that all three demos were done in very warm climates, I was trying this at -4C and that everything (metal bits) had contracted and was jammed together. The alternative is perhaps it was stuck together with adhesive. In any event, I will do some more research and wait for a much warmer day (say +10C or better) and try again.
The last image (image c925c.jpg) is what the dew heater looks like (measured 7 ohms which calculates out to about 20 watts max)
Got WinJupOS?
Winjupos. A word that strikes fear into the hearts of image processors.
You may have heard of it for its ability to “derotate” a series of planetary images, such as Jupiter, combining signal and reducing noise, over a long run of exposures.
Up until yesterday, I still had no idea of what the workflow process was… but that has changed now.
Typically, with Jupiter, I do maybe 10 -20 images runs of up to 180 seconds each. Each run will normally contain 10-20k frames. Because Jupiter rotates so fast, if you do an imaging run of more than 3 minutes the features will have moved from one pixel over to the next, blurring the details. Even if you take the best 10% of 20K frames, you still have only 2K frames for your image processing.
Winjupos will allow you to take that one processed image, and say the other 19 you also did, derotate time and allow you to use 38k more frames/signal and reduce noise… ie using all 20 imaging runs (and 40k frames for example) of that session to create one better quality image.
I have not yet done 20 imaging runs in one session. In fact, two evenings ago was my first session in two months. So all this article will show is the before and after of only 5 imaging runs from 2025 Jan 02.
Sometime in the near future I will go back to my archives, find a good night with a lot of runs, and process those through winjupos.
This first image is my new (fall 2024) standard workflow: autostakkert!, registax, gimp. The image is the best 5% of 12K frames over 120 seconds with an exposure of 3.5ms each. Jupiter was 65 degrees in altitude with an airmass of 1.1 (about as low as you can get). Taken with the C9.25, x1.5 barlow, ZWO ASI585mc camera, UV/IR cut filter, dew heater for the corrector and a dew cap, on a skywatcher az-eq6gt mount that was tracking very well.
The second image is the same as above plus using winupos to combine 5 images together. Each image was also the best 5% of the runs.
after winjupos[/caption]
The signal/data is a little better after than before. The added workflow however is something that I may not do on a regular basis, as it has added even more time that I want.
https://jupos.hier-im-netz.de/ is the home of winjupos but if you just want the download: https://jupos.org/gh/download.htm
The winjupos workflow looks like this:
winjupos to create a single best image of all the nights data in one
program; body; jupiter
recording; image measurement
open image; F11
image save F2
repeatfor total of 5 imaging runs
tools; derotation of images; edit; add all 5 files
compile F12
save
Out last evening (Thursday Nov 7) imaging Saturn.
This is the best image of the best 10% of 10K frames exposed at 18ms. Saturn was only 35 degrees in altitude, seeing was poor, transparency was poor and the was a crescent moon nearby in the sky.
Saturns diameter is approx 18 arcsec. This was processed with autostakkert, regixstax, gimp and imagemagick.
I can’t make out any belts or bands in the southern hemisphere and see only 3 regions in the north. Saturns shadow shows on the rings on the left side of the planet and the rings are dim.
So.. I was having to manually adjust the tracking about every two runs of 180 seconds, as Saturn (in an 800×800 cutout box, in a 1200×1200 region of interest) moved from one side of the FOV to the other. How bad is the tracking I wondered?
I know I have planned another polar align followed by a 2 star align in my TODO list.. but still what is a number for drift?
I went to http://astronomy.tools/calculators/field_of_view/ and entered my specs:
C9.25, x1.5 barlow asi585mc camera.
System FOV 0.18 deg x 0.1deg = 0.18 deg/3600arcsec/deg by 0.1deg/3600arcsec/deg = 648×360 arcsec
Camera: 3840×2160 pixels
So.. the drift of the cutout box (800×800) in 1200×1200 ROI moves 400 pixels in about 360 seconds or ~1 pixel/sec
3840 pixels/648arcsec=6 pixels/arcsec
at ~1 pixel/sec it will take 6 seconds to moves 6 pixels or
it drifts at a rate of 1/6 arcsec/second
Is that good? bad? Can others run the process for comparison?
One of the best events of this apparition, a shadow transit of Ganymede from 20241103 02:39 UTC ending at 04:35, or 126 minutes. I completed 34 imaging runs of 180 seconds each with a 30 second delay between each to let the computer finish the download of the last image
The single image below is from the middle of the event, and Jupiter has risen another 15 degrees since the start. Ganymede has made an appearance on the lower left, moving left to right. No GRS.
So .. how much time…
about 3 hours setup to teardown time
about 6 hours of autostakkert, 340GB across 34 files. (batch) Best 5% of 15K frames of 3ms each
about 30 minutes of registax doing wavelet processing one by one
about 2 hours of GIMP processing, 34 files one by one. about 5 minutes for annotation (batch) with imagemagick
GIMP can do batch-macro-scripting but that is another learning curve. Most of the time I do not have 34 files to process.. only 5 to 10 or so. Much better suited to manualy processing.
no dark frames… havent figured that part out yet.
copyright StarlightCascade Observatory
Saturn is now an evening object, and since I have been using my time for the morning imaging of Jupiter, Saturn has been awhile.
Wow.. a cold cold night! was -5C and a bit more at various times.
So.. This is Saturn from just after the CFL West semifinal where Sask prevailed over BC. Yay!
This is the best 10% of 10K frames of 20ms exposures with Saturn very near the meridian. Earlier that day I also did a firmware upgrade of the skywatcher synscan hand controller… jumped up three versions and the upgrade process went well. Always a dicey decision.. firmwares have been known to brick items.
The dew strap around the corrector and the dew shield worked well. no fogging or condensation of frost on the glass all night (I packed it in around 1am.. more on that in the next note about Jupiter and the Ganymede shadow transit). This processed image was taken around 2146 EDT. The altitude was fairly low at 36 degree but I did not really see any atmospheric dispersion effects. The rings are getting dimmer and harder to make out. The moon Titan was well out of frame last night as well..
autostakkert! registax and gimp processed.
scgo radiojove x2 class flare 20241031-2100 utc
This is the capture by the SCGO RadioJove radio telescope yesterday, an X2 class flare.
Not sure why we picked it up at all as 21:00utc-4=1700EDT.. the sun was still up but it was out of the beam.
From spaceweather.com:
Active sunspot AR3878 erupted again on Oct. 31st (2120 UTC), producing an X2-class solar flare. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured a spray of hot plasma emerging from the blast site:
A pulse of extreme ultraviolet radiation from the flare ionized the top of Earth’s atmosphere, causing a shortwave radio blackout over the Pacific Ocean. Ham radio operators may have noticed loss of signal below 25 MHz for as much as 45 minutes after the flare.
Update: This explosion did not produce a CME. Not all flares do. In fact, AR3878 has a habit of flaring without CMEs. As a result, no geomagnetic storms will result from this event.
This is the 54th imaging session of 2024 in the Serenity Observatory at SCGO.
This mornings three imaging runs of Jupiter occurred in nice warm 15C weather but with a wicked wind of 7kph gusting to 20kph.
It was supposed to be over 50% cloud but we got lucky with a clear hole in the clouds for an hours or so.
Today is also the first foray into more advanced image processing.
So far we acquire a video file of thousands of ms exposure frames, open that in Autostakkert! v4 which sorts them by quality and aligns and stacks them. We generally go with the best 5% or 10% of 15K frames.
Then we take that output and put it into Registax for wavelet processing and RGB colour balance. We get a much sharper image out of that process.
Today I downloaded Gimp 2.10.38 (a free image processing program similar to photoshop) and brought the images (.png format) in one by one and applied some very basic operations on them:
1) colors, levels, black drop, applied to the background and then to the faint processing artifacts of a light ring around the planet. It disappears.
2) colors, saturation, scale up to x1.5
3) filters, enhance, unsharp mask, scale up to x1
export as .png
THe first image on the left is the “regular” autostakkert and registax output. The 2nd image, on the right, is the GIMP enhanced version.
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I can certainly see a difference in the two and consider the GIMP enhanced one a value added image. However there is sooo much more to learn now!
After a very long time, and a bad incident with a cable jamming the scope, we are operational again!
1) a newly repaired heater in the telrad finder was installed
2) the mount was roughly reset to home polar north, started up and a 2 star align was done with Sirius and Mirfak
3) The telrad was aligned with the primary OTA and camera, the finder was shimmed and is better but not centered perfectly yet.
4) Jupiter! Found it in the finder and did a little grid search to find Jupiter. Found it and did the first imaging run in ages.
Overall the image is much softer than normal. This may be due to the high cloud that was out this morning. Io is to the lower right and looks out of focus a bit as well. I had zoomed in a lot to Io to do the initial focussing… guess it was not very good.
THe GreatRedSpot is just appearing on the left limb.
Overall this was the best 5% of 15K frames, using a x1.5 barlow.
Cable management needs more work, focussing needs more work, and the testing of some software to do a little more processing (contrast enhancement, colour saturation, and sharpening) needs to be done as well.
But.. focus on the good things (pun intended)… the mount has been aligned, the telrad has been installed and is aligned, the finder has been installed and is aligned.!
Mars 20241027
Mars is now high enough to be out of the goop and is starting to show some nice detail.
This is the best 5% of 15K frames exposed at 1ms each using an ROI of 1200×1200 and a firecapture cutout of 800×800.
The northern polar cap is seen with the planet showing 9 arc seconds of diameter. Some darker area north of the equator and lighter areas south. Using Sky & Telescopes Maps previewer, I could not actually match any features.
Mars altitude was 65 degrees high.
These annotations are incorrect as they state the OTA was the Vixen VC200L. This was actually the Celestron 9.25.. have to update the scripts and reprocess the annotations.