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Allsky1pi did *not* capture 2020dec07 fireball event

Dec13
by catz on December 13, 2020 at 11:32
Posted In: astronomy

After the great “Brockville” fireball of 2020dec07, 19:30EST, we checked allsky1pi as well to see if it recorded the event that allsky2 (UWO) captured.

It did not.

Hmm… wonder why not?

After days of troubleshooting we came across an interesting anomaly.

The allsky1pi camera performs autoexposure from early dusk through dark and into early dawn. Looking at Sunday’s data, we had approx 540 images at 161MB, and during the dark cycle these maxed out at 60 seconds.

Interestingly enough, the config file for the software lists exposures and maxexposures at 90 seconds. hmmm.. looking more carefully at each image, they are in fact timestamped 90 seconds apart, not 60.

hmmm.

It seems that the camera is exposing up to a max of 60 seconds and then waiting for 30 seconds to fulfill the configuration file’s 90 sec entry.

Checking the camera stats, it says it can do up to 1000seconds. So.. a possible problem explained but not fixed.

https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/product/asi120mc-color

We changed the configuration to 60seconds for exposure and maxexposure and reviewing the last two nights, it seems to be working. Timestamps are now only 60 seconds apart for 60 sec exposures and there are approx 820 images now at 270MB.

So the most likely answer as to why allsky1 did NOT capture the event.. it happened in the30 second deadtime between exposures.

OK.. that is now fixed! no more missing time!

Still have to figure out what is responsible for limiting it to only 60 seconds? The camera hardware itself in some way? The autoexposure has some limiting factor configured somewhere else? Gremlins?

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Fireball Monday 2020Dec07 19:30:38 EST

Dec10
by catz on December 10, 2020 at 16:11 and modified on December 10, 2020. at 16:25
Posted In: astronomy

A nice fireball entered the atmosphere around 95km up just north of Fort Drum in Upper New York State, heading north, and ending 36km up just northwest of Brockville Ontario.
2020 December 07 19:30:38 EST
2020 December 08 00:31:38 UTC

We had been outside just prior to this, photographing Jupiter and Saturn but had gone in just before.

The default source of reports can be found here: https://fireball.amsmeteors.org/members/imo_view/event/2020/7440

The event was detected by three meteor cameras (Yarker, Oak Heights and Ottawa) belonging to The University of Western Ontario’s Southern Ontario Meteor Network.
A complete writeup with video from all three camera systems can be found here:
https://fireballs.ndc.nasa.gov/skyfalls/events/20201208-003040

This is the video captured at the system based here:

https://starlightcascade.ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/cut_20201208_003036_10A.mp4

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Mars 2020Nov14

Nov15
by catz on November 15, 2020 at 16:33 and modified on November 15, 2020. at 17:10
Posted In: astronomy


Mars on the cold evening of Saturday Nov 14th. It was already -6C but clear and relatively stable air. To get around the postprocessing overexposure of the last few nights, these were underexposed on purpose, down to about the 70% level on firecapture histogram.

The BAA Mars Mapper has South up but otherwise is helpful in identifying surface features.

Only two 5 minute imaging runs were completed that evening. This is the animated .gif of the two together. This is with a x2 barlow and as you can see, the absolute pixel size of Mars is small and getting smaller. We have heard of other imagers using up to x5 barlows (with a subsequent 25 times less light than no barlow at all), so that means you need a bigger telescope. That means I still need a bigger telescope.
Syrtis Minor is approaching the centre with Hellas towards the bottom left and Syrtis Major on the far left.

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Weather – Frost update 2020

Nov14
by catz on November 14, 2020 at 11:47 and modified on November 14, 2020. at 11:48
Posted In: weather

We maintain and publish date and growing season information based on the first and last light frosts (-1C) and the first and last heavy frost (-3C) of each season.
This is the latest update showing the 2018 growing season.
It was much shorter than average this year due to late light frosts into June, only the 2nd time in our recorded history, and early light frosts in September.
The same for the heavy plant killing frosts, both later in the spring and earlier in the fall, than the avergage.

	StarlightCascade Gardens & Observatory  Weather Station					Yarker Ontario Canada		
	LIGHT  FROST (-1C)					HEAVY FROST (-3C)		
Year		#days	#weeks		Year		#days	#weeks
2003	Apr30-Oct23	176	25		2003	Apr24-Nov08	198	28
2004	May08-Oct11	156	22		2004	Apr16-Nov03	201	29
2005	May17-Oct20	156	22		2005	Mar13-Oct21	222	32
2006		no data	no data		2006		no data	no data
2007	May18-Oct12	147	21		2007	May13-Oct13	153	22
2008	May06-Oct06	154	22		2008	Apr30-Oct07	160	23
2009	May13-Sep19	129	18		2009	Apr17-Oct12	179	26
2010	Jun13-Oct10	119	17		2010	Jun11-Nov01	143	20
2011	Apr22-Sep17	149	21		2011	Apr22-Oct06	167	24
2012	Apr30-Oct08	162	23		2012	Apr30-Oct12	165	24
2013	May14-Sep16	125	18		2013	May14-Oct29	168	24
2014	May18-Sep19	124	18		2014	Apr25-Sep19	147	21
2015	May23-Oct10	140	20		2015	May23-Oct17	147	21
2016	May18-Sep25	130	19		2016	May10-Sep25	138	20
2017	May11-Oct01	143	20		2017	May10-Oct17	160	23
2018	May12-Oct05	146	21		2018	Apr23-Oct14	174	25
2019	Apr29-Oct05	159	23		2019	Apr29-Oct05	159	23
2020	Jun01-Sep15	107	15		2020	May14-Sep19	128	18

min		107	15		     min		128	18
average		142	20		     average		165	24
median		146	21		     median		160	23
max		176	25		     max		222	32
stddev		18	3		     stddev		24	4

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Mars 2020nov04

Nov06
by catz on November 6, 2020 at 08:10 and modified on November 6, 2020. at 08:14
Posted In: astronomy

Mars on Wednesday evening during the weekly social chat videoconference. Now that we are on Standard Time, it is a little easier to get outside and image in the evening.
This is the BAA Mars Mapper simulation (their south is up, my south is down). It can be found here:
https://britastro.org/node/23843
I only wish they would add the ability to flip it to reflect my personal optics.

Sinus Meridiani is central with Chryse on the upper left moving to the right. The south polar cap is not really all that visible, and the bright spot on the lower right is the Hellas Basin.

I just noticed that the image of the telescope setup is old and incorrect. The 90 deg diagonal was removed some time ago. I will have to find a newer image to reflect reality!


Tracking continues to be so-so on the Meade LXD55 mount. Manual guiding corrections are needed every 30-60 seconds or so.
The new firecapture beta 2 is working well. I still do a 30 second no autoalign and then a 30 second autoalign, followed by 180 second runs with autoalign, then a 120 second wait, giving a cycle of 5 minutes from one imaging run to the next.

Lastly the animation of 9 imaging runs.

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Mars 2020Nov01

Nov02
by catz on November 2, 2020 at 13:59 and modified on November 2, 2020. at 14:03
Posted In: astronomy

After the last session on Oct30, I thought there were dust spots on the camera sensor window glass, so this was cleaned. I wanted to test it but there were so many clouds… but there was a gap in the clouds last night, for maybe 60 seconds. This is the result of processing a very short imaging run, maybe 30 seconds with enough cloud to reduce the exposures from the normal 10ms to 20ms. This is the best 25% of maybe 1K frames.

The annotation on the image regarding the % and number of frames is incorrect.

Not enough light areas on this to see if the dust spots are gone.. will go back to the moon or sun and see what has happened.

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Mars 2020Oct30

Oct31
by catz on October 31, 2020 at 10:18 and modified on October 31, 2020. at 10:26
Posted In: astronomy


A good clear night, the first in a long time, albeit a little cold.
Mars is now up high fairly early on in the evening, so we went out and imaged Mars from 20:45 to 21:12 EDT. The almost full moon was up and fairly close to Mars, so it would not have been a great night in any event.
All of the images were overexposed, even though I progressed down from 13ms to 11ms. It wasn’t enough.
There was a lot of skyglow from the Moon and so far I am attributing it to that.
Transparency was poor, seeing was average.
Mars was 39 degrees altitude, an apparent diameter of 20.23 arcseconds, Magnitude -2.2
The animation does show surface detail moving, so I am a happy camper.. the session worked.
The partial dew shield I am using is a cardboard file folder cut on a diagonal. It doesn’t work well however as the equatorial mount can turn the telescope itself upside down and then the dew shield does not work at all.
TODO action item for today, build another one that is more fully symmetrical.
Also, whilst imaging the almost full moon, I noticed a lot of hard dust spots on the images. Turning the camera, the spots did not move, therefore they are on the camera portion of the optical system, not the barlow or the telescope itself.
TODO action item for today, clean the camera.. again.

Lastly the animation of 8 observing runs, ranging from 30 seconds to 240 seconds.

We went inside as the temperature had plummeted to -8C and we are not nearly acclimatized to that amount of cold quite yet.

The next week looks much warmer and I am looking forward to getting out again as Mars rises even higher.

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Linux Fedora 33 released

Oct27
by catz on October 27, 2020 at 14:18
Posted In: tech

Today was a good day. Linux Fedora 33 came out today. And is the upgrade process ever fast! and stable!
in less than 1 hour we have upgraded 4 server class systems from linux fedora 32 to 33 and not one of them had a single hiccup.

* complete fedora 33 upgrade
do this process to upgrade fedora 32 to 33:
su
13:38 dnf upgrade –refresh
13:42 dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade
13:43 dnf system-upgrade download –releasever=33
Fedora Server Edition
Upgrading Groups:
Administration Tools
FTP Server
Headless Management
Mail Server
Common NetworkManager Submodules
Fedora Server product core
Windows File Server
Standard
Basic Web Server
Window Managers
Core
Hardware Support
System Tools
Transaction Summary
=======================================================================
Install 219 Packages
Upgrade 1536 Packages
Remove 5 Packages
Downgrade 19 Packages
Total download size: 1.2 G
DNF will only download packages, install gpg keys, and check the transaction.
Is this ok [y/N]: y
13:54 dnf system-upgrade reboot
14:12 completed after reboot: 18 minutes
su
dnf clean packages
SUCCESS

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Mars 2020Oct21

Oct22
by catz on October 22, 2020 at 09:10 and modified on October 22, 2020. at 09:52
Posted In: astronomy

Mars Wednesday evening. It was unexpectedly somewhat clear, at least in the direction of Mars, last night. A lot of cloud all around, affecting other imagers to some degree.
This was a run of 8, approx 180seconds each, shorter for the initial run as usual.

Identifying features: I used to use the Sky and Telescope Mars Previewer, but it is finicky to time zone settings and often confusing. Since then I have started to use the

British Astronomical Association Mars Mapper. One issue I have with it, it does not seem to allow a north-south switch. I image with north up, it shows south up. I also looked at Stellarium, but do not believe it shows correct surface features for the time.

S&T Mars Previewer

Stellarium

BAA Mars Mapper

The southern pole ice cap shows a little. The lighter colour of the northern hemisphere is the Tharsus region, with Olympus Mons (not really showing detail). The darker southern hemisphere contains features such as Solis Lacus but again you can’t really identify in these low resolution images.
Of these three, the BAA is the only one to overlay names, which is very handy when you are first getting used to the topography.

Since then I have also started to use the Sky&Tel Mars Previewer again, this time setting it to UTC time. It seems to work better and I will go back to using it to compare what I image to what is supposed to be reality.

Lastly, the 8 images animated together:

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Mars 2020 Oct 17

Oct19
by catz on October 19, 2020 at 16:51 and modified on October 21, 2020. at 11:12
Posted In: astronomy

This is one of only two imaging runs of Mars on Friday evening.

Another long day and a short night… not enough sleep hours in a day

After completing the double shadow transit of Jupiter, Mars had just risen above the treeline.

Best 10% of 16K images! Low altitude… one of these days I will be able to stay up late enough to capture mars overhead… if the cloud cooperate!

Lastly.. how to compare against known references to identify surface features… We have the Mars Previewer from Sky and telescope, Stellarium, The British Astronomical Association Mars Mapper. We will run a test one of these days…

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Jupiter double shadow transit 2020oct17

Oct19
by catz on October 19, 2020 at 08:26 and modified on October 19, 2020. at 08:34
Posted In: astronomy

Shadow transits of Moons of Jupiter on Jupiter are relatively common.
Double shadow transits are somewhat less common.
Seen here is the moon Io off to the right with two shadows, one from Callisto and the other from Io, also off to the right. The Great Red Spot appears only in the first few image runs, then goes around the edge.

The double transits and the Great Red Spot were to begin at 17:25 EDT but it was still daylight. The telescope pointing could not find Jupiter, not until 18:27 when Jupiter was visible to the naked eye and the Telrad finder helped aim the scope.
Images were taken every five minutes until the end of the event at 19:25 EDT. So instead of 2 hours, only 1 hour of images were captured.

Images runs were 180 seconds each and processed with PIPP, Autostakkert! and Registax for wavelets.
An animated .gif of the entire event is below:

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Astronomy image processing

Oct18
by catz on October 18, 2020 at 10:24 and modified on October 18, 2020. at 10:48
Posted In: astronomy

The current desktop computer that processes all of our astronomy images is nine years old.

It’s specs are:
Intelcore 2 Duo E7400 @ 2.8GHz, 4GB DDR2, 120GB SSD, DVD, Win10Pro64bit, sata 4tb drive, usb2 4tb wdmybook2016, nvidia geforce gt720 gpu

It typically processed 100GB of video files each run, first with PIPP to centre, crop and convert from .ser to .avi files in a batch run.

Next is autostakkert!3 which can also batch process the .avi and after analysis, typically stacks the best 5%, 10% and 25%. It also normalizes the stack and applies a x1.5 drizzle. This can take literally *hours*.
After that, Registax wavelets are applied but they are pretty quick.

All of this led to the conclusion that it was time to upgrade the computer.
We found a higher end, slightly newer system, refurbished for $240Can. Its specs are:
Lenovo ThinkCentre M91P (Refurbished) Desktop Computer, Intel CI5-2400 @3.1GHZ, 8GB DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SATA drive, DVD-ROM, Windows 10 Home.
Faster processor with more cores, more and faster RAM and in general a higher end system… should be great!

The 1TB SATA boot drive was replaced with a 120GB SSD, the GPU transferred across, the internal 4TB spinning drive and the external USB2 4TB drive moved across and the system was up and running.

BENCHMARKS
PIPP Core2Duo 8m15s, Core I5 8m30s
This indicates that PIPP is not CPU bound but rather drive bound. Will run the tests again with all data files on SSD.

AUTOSTAKKERT!3 Core2Duo 16m43s, Core I5d 5m0s
4 cores instead of 2 is a big improvement.. 70% less time.
Many more files were run and the results were within a few percentage points.

A 12 hour run would drop to under 4 hours, a meaningful difference between finishing tomorrow or today.

The only down side.. it is still pretty old itself.. instead of a nine year old system, we now have an eight year old system 🙁

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