supersid operational

Apr14
by catz on April 14, 2019 at 16:59 and modified on April 15, 2019. at 09:51
Posted In: astronomy, tech

SuperSID receiver

supersid receiver, basically just an RF preamp


Our supersid system has been operating at the edge of the property for 3 years now, mainly to get as faraway from any house generated RFI as we can. Too bad the wifi was intermittent, even with a relay. The netbook itself also suffered from some issues, like locking up or rebooting and not finding its boot drive.
So we made the decision to bring in the netbook, move the antenna over closer to some other computers with wired connections. The antenna was mounted on a 4×4 post in concrete and after a lot of digging then dragging, the antenna and mount were in their new location.
Attempts to get the supersid receiver working on a windows 10 laptop totally failed. All it required was a 5vdc power supply which it got through a usb jack, and the audio output from the receiver into the laptop. We tried various usb sound adapters, the original multiport audio jack and everything else we could think of. All of it came up with was no audio input.. ever.
So this afternoon, the old netbook came back into service, this time on a wired network, and all is working well. If the netbook itself behaves, we should have the first results sometime after 20:00 EDT tomorrow.
The long term plan remains to replace the data logging netbook with a raspberry pi and some python code. Less power, more reliable…

new location of loop antenna for supersid, aimed east

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Gardening in April

Apr05
by catz on April 5, 2019 at 09:22 and modified on April 5, 2019. at 09:36
Posted In: gardening


It is only April the 5th, but yesterday we were out surveying the gardens and trying to ignore the piles of snow still here and there.
Great plans are being made … and bumping right up against the reality of frozen ground.
The hoop house in VegBed11 seems to be helping… the air temperature inside was much warmer than outside after work yesterday. We will throw in a thermometer shortly to measure the air and ground temperature inside the small Lee Valley hoophouse.
Tomatos will be planted this weekend, and will go into the greenhouse as there is not enough room left in the house… which means the electric heat in the greenhouse will have to come on as well.
It is all hurry up and wait as there is a tremendous amount of outdoor work needed to be done as soon as possible.

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Davis Vantage Vue Weather Station repair

Apr04
by catz on April 4, 2019 at 08:09 and modified on April 19, 2019. at 08:41
Posted In: life the universe and everything, tech

Update: 12 days later the new CR123 lithium battery died as well. No data is logged during the night period, and even if it is really cloudy in the day either. We’ve contacted Davis and are awaiting a reply.

Weather station


We set up the Davis Vantage Vue wireless weather station in 2013 January. For the most part it has been running fine and better than the two previous stations we have had: Oregon WMR968 (2007 Jan – 2012 Dec) – Radioshack WX200 (2002 July – 2006 Dec).
However, back in the fall it started to act up. The symptoms were that it (the ISS/transmitter station package) stopped working at night. It has a CR123A lithium battery as backup to the solar panel which powers it during the day, so we thought it had just died. We purchased a new battery for about $5Can, tested it and installed it. The station startedworking again immediately… and after only a few weeks, it broke again. The new battery was dead.
OK. So maybe it was a bad battery. Install another new, tested battery. Worked fine for a few weeks then stopped again.
Some research said that the onboard “supercapacitor” had probably failed. Something that stores up extra solar panel power during the day to run the instrument package at night.
Last night I took down the ISS and took it apart. Inside was far less then I thought there would be and nowhere to be found was a supercapacitor.
Pictures will come later, but in essence the solar panel connects to the battery and to the instrument package, which is well sealed with goop against moisture. If there is a capacitor inside that package, I don’t want to open it up in fear that it will not be able to be sealed again.
So for the interim, purchase of some new CR123 batteries will happen today and the station will go back outside, to a new location… something more easily accessible (6′ instead of 8′ above ground, and not behind one more garden gate that freezes up in the winter).
After that we will look into larger external power sources and perhaps a newer bigger solar panel to help out.

Another interesting side effect of the outside ISS unit not working correctly… the indoor unit temperature acts very strange. On the image below the left side of the graph with noisy data is with the outdoor ISS unit out of service, the right side smooth data after the ISS is operational again.

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365 days of astronomy – april update

Apr02
by catz on April 2, 2019 at 09:55 and modified on April 2, 2019. at 09:59
Posted In: astronomy

In the theme of 365 Days of Astronomy, we made a New Year Resolution to attempt to observe or image every day possible in 2019.
These are the results:

The numbers are in for March 2019 in the 365 days of astronomy at SCGO

January 23/31
February 16/28
March 22/31

This totals 61/90 of days where one of the other of us has gone outdoors in the morning, afternoon or evening to image or observe.

Upcoming projects in April: recommission Supersid using a raspberry pi as a data logger; move supersid towards north to take advantage of wired ethernet instead of intermittent wifi; installation of a low light aurora camera

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linux kernel v5

Mar26
by catz on March 26, 2019 at 10:22 and modified on March 26, 2019. at 10:26
Posted In: tech


The linux kernel v5 has arrived. This morning during a routine update check, there it was:
Linux version 5.0.3-200.fc29.x86_64
According the Linus, there is nothing particular special about moving major versions from 4 to 5, but having said that, it is still a psychological threshold.
The real reason for moving from v4.20.x to v5 was something about running out of toes and fingers to count past 20 🙂

So.. start with the least critical linux fedora server and run a
sudo dnf upgrade
watch it install without errors and sudo reboot
A few seconds later, the SSD has restarted and a successful login follows.
dmesg | more
gets me the latest running version info.
Now we watch it for an hour or two and if there are no issues, try it out on the next least critical server… and so on.
So far so good on three systems. We will wait at this point for a few more days of operation before trying out the upgrade on the most critical systems… just in case.

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Apollo 11 – two rockets up

Mar21
by kevin on March 21, 2019 at 13:55 and modified on March 21, 2019. at 13:57
Posted In: space


Apollo 11- a documentary with a lot of new archived 70mm footage and what I think were some large format film images that were processed into higher resolution gorgeous final products.. like the lunar panorama.
Highly recommended.. although it may not be in theaters long, as it is a documentary. Will be looking for a bluray release of this for sure.
Impressed by the cameramen of the day and what they thought to cover at the time for use in the future.
Also curious as to the film recovery from the Saturn V second stage that covered the first stage separation along with the spacer ring between 1st and 2nd stages.

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Upgrading an Imac

Mar13
by catz on March 13, 2019 at 14:12 and modified on April 15, 2019. at 09:58
Posted In: tech


This is a tale of upgrading an imac… a 21.5″ late 2015 imac to be precise. We bought it, we used it, it started slowing down.. a lot. various upgrades of OSX and it slowed down even more. It came with 8GB of RAM and is not upgradable at all.
We asked for a quote from a local Mac service company to clone and replace the internal 1TB spinning SATA drive with a smaller 240GB Solid State Drive (SSD). It came back at over $500Can. That was a bit much so we deferred and came up with an alternative. We purchased a Kingston 240GB SSD (about $50Can) and an external USB3 case (about $25Can), installed and ran carbon copy clone on the 1TB to the 240GB and told OSX to boot from the external USB drive going forward.
That worked! The SSD drive, even as an external USB device, still performed noticeably better than the original internal spinning disk (still inside, still spinning, just not used).
After a year or two the Imac started to lock up or crash. The external USB SSD was corrupting. So we took this opportunity to wipe it, run disk utility programs to clean it up, then recloned it, this time with the intention of opening up the imac, removing the 1tb spinning drive and installing the SSD.
The theory was that this would be even faster, being on an internal SATA interface, but also safer, as the external USB method had other issues with cables, motion, coffee cups, etc.
Searching through Youtube, we found a nice little video that said, it’s easy! as long as you have the right tools!
Those tools included a Torx 10 screwdriver, and a couple of plastic wedging tools, one to pry open the display off the case and the other to cut through the double sided adhesive keeping the display attached.
That worked out well and within 20 minutes the new drive was in place and booting up.
Yay! It worked!

Benchmark Times

Internal spinning drive via SATA (seconds)
powerup to logo 10
powerup to login 91
powerup to desktop 101

external Solid state drive via USB3 (seconds)
powerup to logo 8
powerup to login 31
powerup to desktop 34

internal Solid state driver via SATA (seconds)
powerup to logo 5
powerup to login 17
powerup to desktop 22

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Another meteor event 20190309 02:22:23 UTC

Mar09
by catz on March 9, 2019 at 16:52 and modified on March 12, 2019. at 15:34
Posted In: astronomy


Another fireball captured on the Allsky2 camera system, first reported by a local astronomer in a hot tub 🙂
The 4MB video can be seen here.
We captured only the first 4 seconds of the event as it passed beyond the image frame edge.
This was seen by others and reported to the American Meteor Society.
To the lower right is Orion with Betelgeuse and Rigel, Sirius, and moving upward Procyon, Pollux and Castor.

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Sky Anomaly

Mar08
by catz on March 8, 2019 at 12:44 and modified on March 9, 2019. at 16:49
Posted In: astronomy

Greetings… this is an interesting one.

A sky anomaly went overhead last night (Thursday 2019 March 7th) at 23:38:30 UTC, 18:38:30 EST

overhead towards the north.

A link to the13 second long video is at:

https://starlightcascade.ca/allsky2/video/ev_20190307_233830A_10A.mp4

The dimmer object travelling west to east is an aircraft, 777 from toronto to cairo at 31000 feet doing 515 knots.

Not the ISS, no heavens-above satellites in that time frame, no other aircraft on flightradar24.com, no reports on the AMS site.

In addition, not a standard meteor that starts dim, brightens up then fades.
Upon closer inspection, the starting point looks like it might be two objects.

Any other observers? any thoughts as to what else it might be?

Updated: The consensus has turned this event into an aircraft from the local Kingston airport. The two seperated point sources while overhead and then merging into one as the distance increased was a good argument. No strobe light, but apparently those are not always on or may have been blocked by line of sight.

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8 second meteor 2019 March 01

Mar04
by catz on March 4, 2019 at 11:55 and modified on March 12, 2019. at 15:28
Posted In: astronomy

Upon reviewing and discovering bugs in the last weeks worth of Allsky2 camera code, I processed it manually and came across this nice 8 second meteor on the morning of Friday 2019 March 01, 09:34:32 UTC or -5 hours for 04:34:32 EST
The 8 second video is here.

This came from the West South West and ended in the North North East.
I haven’t come across any other reports as of yet, so posting it here, in case it shakes loose some new reports.

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SSD upgrade

Feb07
by catz on February 7, 2019 at 09:28 and modified on February 7, 2019. at 09:33
Posted In: tech

Wow. This is for any imagers in particular out there, with a desktop of laptop computer with a spinning hard drive.
Replace it with a Solid State Drive (SSD). Now! The prices have dropped in half in the last 8 months.

Many laptops these days are coming with a 120GB SSD but if you image at all, you know that it can and will fill up quickly. I routinely fill up the unused 80GB in the space of an hour or two. Last May (2018) we upgraded Kims laptop from a 120GB to a 480 GB for $184Can
This was a Kingston Digital 480GB UV400 SSD C2C 2.5″

Today I just received one for my laptop, a Kingston Digital A400 SSD 480GB SATA 3 2.5”, not exactly the same model as above but certainly good enough… for only $75Can, both through amazon.ca Wow! Again, a huge price drop in less than 9 months.

You will benefit from this:
Much faster read/write response! Less heat generated inside the laptop. Better timetofailure. Faster startup! Faster program load. Faster data save. More impact resistance (either dropping on ground or pounding on in frustration). Better laptop battery life. Less susceptible to extremes of hot or cold (like out in an observatory).
Absolutely recommended!

I ran through the upgrade process last night and was done in about 90 minutes.
My first method failed, using macrium reflect to make a disk image stored on a network file server, then booting from a macrium reflect recvoery cd and restoring the image… the software was too old and could not see the drive image.

Working process:
1. Clean laptop Drive to free up more space; remove restore points, and have less to clone.
2. Shut down, remove 120GB drive, install 480GB drive.
3. Connected 120GB SSD to an external USB3 enclosure, and booted a clonezilla cdrom.
Cloned the 120gb to 480gb in about 1.5 hours. Disconnected the external 120gb SSD and test reboot the new drive. OK! A couple of reboots by windows later and it was up and running and showing a 110GB partition.
Now lets try to extend the 100GB partition, failed. The Windows recovery partition is in the way, and Windows would not delete it.
OK. Run aomei partition manager software, delete last two partitions. Worked! Then extend main c: drive partition into the rest of the drive.
Reboot. Works! Now showing 446GB with 369GB free!

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Snowbound

Jan30
by catz on January 30, 2019 at 16:21 and modified on January 30, 2019. at 16:29
Posted In: life the universe and everything, weather


What do we do when stuck inside for the winter? Revisit some classic video.

  • We started with the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition Trilogy, which took a little over 14 hours. It was great! Have to wait a bit before trying that much again for the Hobbit, in three parts!
  • Next was the one and only season of what could have gone on for many season, Firefly with Nathan Filion.
  • We dove into the Doctor Who spinoff series called Torchwood, with John Barrowman and Eve Myles. It was a little uneven, and very dark at times, but we powered through four seasons of that!
  • The latest series is something with one of our fave actors, Jason Momoa (Game of Thrones, Stargate Atlantis), called Frontier. A great historic drama about the founding days of Canada, the Hudson Bay Company and the Fur Trade. We have gone through the first two seasons and have just started the third and last (so far) season.

    There are still some old series that we have not yet seen but will schedule for the next blizzard… Breaking Bad, Lost and a few others. Competing with that are two that we have seen before but is time to watch again, namely Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica.

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