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Jupiter 2022August28

Aug31
by kevin on August 31, 2022 at 09:36 and modified on August 31, 2022. at 09:40
Posted In: astronomy

This is the massive planet Jupiter in the early morning hours of Sunday 2022August28.
There are 39 usable runs of 180seconds each with a 120second delay between each, resulting in 12 runs an hour, so this is about 3 hours 15 minutes to watch the Great Red Spot traverse across the field of view.
Interestingly, Jupiter was before at and after its highest altitude, but the exposure had to change from 10ms to 35ms to keep the exposure relatively the same. There seemed to be a lot of bad transparency hanging out over Lake Ontario and affecting the Jupiter Imaging Session.
One of the changes in the last year was the use of an equatorial mount instead of an alt-az mount. During the course of the nights runs, you will not that Jupiter does not change its orientation, like it would with alt-az.

This is near peak altitude, which is still much better than years past! And opposition is coming up at the end of September. It is just shy of 45 degrees altitude in this selected mid run image, showing the GRS centered in the field of view.

The planet itself has an apparent diameter of a little more than 48 arc seconds.

This was a 180 second run resulting in 7567 frames captured, each at about 20ms. After processing the best 10%, 25% and 40%, I chose to further process only the best 10%.
The processing pipeline is: autostakkert!v3 for align, stacking and drizzling x1.5, registax v6 for wavelet processing, and Imagemagick for annotation by parsing the firecapture text log file.
I still hope to add another step or two afterward, perhaps some contrast and colour saturation.

Below is an animated .GIF for the 39 resulting imaging runs for the morning from 04:42 UTC to 07:53 UTC = 00:42 EDT to 03:53 EDT. This may have been my longest ever continuous imaging run of Jupiter.

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Saturn 2022Aug28

Aug31
by kevin on August 31, 2022 at 09:15 and modified on August 31, 2022. at 09:28
Posted In: astronomy

This is the Ring Planet Saturn in the early morning hours of Sunday 2022 August 28th.. just past midnight actually local Eastern Daylight Time.
This is near peak altitude, which is still quite relatively low, at almost 30 degrees above the southern horizon.
The planet itself has an apparent diameter of 18.6 arc seconds, with the rings almost double that.
This was a 180 second run resulting in 4100 frames captured, each at about 43ms. After processing the best 10%, 25% and 40%, I chose to further process only the best 10%.
The processing pipeline is: autostakkert!v3 for align, stacking and drizzling x1.5, registax v6 for wavelet processing, and Imagemagick for annotation by parsing the firecapture text log file.
I still hope to add another step or two afterward, perhaps some contrast and colour saturation.

Some other members of the club took an image like this and processed it in Adobe photoshop, splitting the image into 3 colour channels (RGB) and then aligning them to overcome the Atmospheric Dispersion caused by looking through so much airmass. In this image without that additional work, you can se in the back of the rings, a blue tinge on the top of the ring and a red tinge on the bottom of the ring.
You can also purchase a piece of equipment, an ADC, from ZWO as perhaps elsewhere, to correct this at the source.

Below is the animated .GIF of the seven runs of Saturn showing shorter 30 second runs to record seeing, and spotting of a dust mote and shifting the planet to another section of the sensor.

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Jupiter 2022Aug20

Aug21
by kevin on August 21, 2022 at 17:48 and modified on August 31, 2022. at 10:00
Posted In: astronomy

This is from late in the morning on Saturday 2022 August 20th. The scheduled 01:00 EDT imaging session was clouded out. But it did clear up enough around 05:00 to get out and do 7 imaging runs of Jupiter.
The Great Red Spot is front and centre as well as a dark flying bird looking thingy.
Turns out that this is the moon Europas shadow going across the face of Jupiter. I was not aware of this event! Serendipity!
Even better… Europa itself is transitting. It is the relatively bright little spot near the leftmost limb of Jupiter, down a cloud layer or two from the shadow.

Lastly we have debugged the animation scripts and have the delay between images working:

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Saturn 2022 aug 12-13-14

Aug15
by kevin on August 15, 2022 at 12:21 and modified on August 15, 2022. at 12:23
Posted In: astronomy

This is from Friday morning of Saturn nearing opposition. Close enough to not even matter!
This is the best image of approx 34 runs that morning. It was at 07:33 UTC-4=03:33 EDT
taken with firecapture, stacked with Autostakkert! v3, wavelets in Registax v6, annotated with Imagemagick in Linux

It was taken past its highest altitude, down from maybe 30 degrees to 23 degrees in this image. more airmass to see through!

Atmospheric dispersion can be seen with blue on the top and red on the bottom of various features (like the rings). Perhaps a ZWO ADC would help!
https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/product/zwo-adc

Only a mere $128USD… pretty reasonable compared to almost *every* single other piece of astro kit!
seeing was poor, transparency was poor, the near full moon was very close within 4 or 5 degrees.
Still the best saturn image I have ever taken! Letsee what Saturday and Sunday night runs look like!

This is from the next night, Friday night/Saturday morning at 05:15 UTC-5=01:15 EDT
I had stayed up Friday evening and imaged Saturn as it came up out of the horizon … and they were all terrible.

Took a short nap, and got up again early on Saturday morning and did a few more runs before the clouds came and shut me down.

Again, seeing was poor, transparency was poor and the full moon was still within 20 degrees.
Exposure time was average, between 40 and 50ms. Colour contrast on the cloud bands not quite as good as 20220812.

taken with firecapture, stacked with Autostakkert! v3, wavelets in Registax v6, annotated with Imagemagick in Linux

The last of a 3 nights/mornings in a row.. the longest stretch of astronomy I have done in a long time!

So much so that I am unsure of day or night, orange juice or screwdriver? I only know that tomorrow is the “W” day and I must get to sleep real soon now.

Last night/this morning.. Saturday evening stayed outside with Kim doing some visual observing. at 22:00 went inside to watch The Game… CFL Sask at Edmonton. At half time they went into a delay due to thunder and lightning near the stadium. The game resumed and ended around 01:30, at which point I went outside and started some Saturn imaging runs. I was dead on my feet my this time. Not nearly enough nap time in the last two days to make up for the lack of sleep.

I noticed that I was falling asleep at the same time as some clouds were coming in, so I pulled the plug after an hour, or 15 runs.

The moon was much further away, the skies a little clearer. Seeing was maybe average, transparency maybe average.

The Rings look great and I can almost see a second division next to the Cassini division. Don’t know yet if that is a processing artefact or real.

The cloud banding was more pronounced as well… ok.. this is one of the best Saturn images of my imaging career

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2022Aug13 Perseid Meteor Shower Peak

Aug13
by kevin on August 13, 2022 at 19:53
Posted In: astronomy

Last night was not too shabby! 78 events were recorded on the UWO Yarker #10 camera, aka Allsky2 here at SCGO:

This is a wonderful double event… two separate meteors one starting just as the other ends. Both on parallel tracks, both with long trails:

https://starlightcascade.ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/ev_20220813_013437B_10A.mp4

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Jupiter 20220806

Aug07
by kevin on August 7, 2022 at 17:31 and modified on August 8, 2022. at 16:15
Posted In: astronomy


This is one of the better images of Jupiter on Saturday morning

Seeing I judged to be average, transparency average or a little lower.

08:30 UTC = 04:30 EDT.

The Great Red Spot is past central meridian and moving left to right.

The Jovian moon Europa is in the lower right moving left to right.

I managed to add some more details from the firecapture generated .txt file annotated onto the image, namely the airmass, altitude, CMI indexes (longitude data of Jupiter), Apparent Diameter and the total frames captured. Only the best 10% were used to generate the still image.

An animated video was created out of the 27 runs of the morning, with the first one or two showing a lot of digital noise because they were only 30 second runs, not 180 second runs… less data, more noise.

Also attached is the video. A curiousity… It shows 4 objects rotating around the planet. I use Stellarium as by source of information to identify the Jovian moons in aimages after the fact. Lower right moving away: Europa. Upper right moving in: Io

The lower left moving in and upper left moving out I cannot identify!

Stellarium shows that Ganymede is in the upper left but much farther away from the planet than it shows.

Nothing comes up for the lower left object moving in.

I thought of background stars moving but I rarely if ever pick up stars in these 10-20ms exposures.

Does anyone else have a handy and easy to use reference for information like this?

Lastly, some more dust motes appear in a few frames in the middle… have to clean the camera again!

https://starlightcascade.ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2022-08-06-Jupiter.mp4
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Jupiter & Io 20220731

Aug02
by kevin on August 2, 2022 at 09:41 and modified on August 2, 2022. at 09:46
Posted In: astronomy

Jupiter on the morning of 2022 July31st… a night that was supposed to be clear but in reality had average seeing and poor transparency and more and more high cloud rolling in.
A quick look at Stellarium showed only 3 moons, as did the ephemeris feature of firecapture. Io I thought was in behind Jupiter and would come out around 04:30EDT, so I kept an eye out for it. As it turns out, it did come out on time. After processing, a surprise… it had been passing in front of Jupiter!
No Great Red Spot this session but Io more than makes up for it!

That is the bright spot in the lower right side of Jupiter.
This imaging session ran for about 2 hours, and ended up with 32 usable imaging runs.
Those were put together using the ImageMagick command: convert *.png jupiter.mpg

jupiter-20220731

https://starlightcascade.ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Jupiter-20220731.mp4
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Jupiter 20220727

Aug01
by kevin on August 1, 2022 at 10:51
Posted In: astronomy

This is Jupiter from the last imaging run of the morning.. approaching 05:30 EDT on July 27th. Jupiter is approaching zenith and in a few more weeks it will be ideally suited for the least atmosphere between it and me.

The North Equatorial Belt (NEB) is narrow but dark in colour and contrast. The Great Red Spot is nicely centered in this image.

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Jupiter 20220726

Jul28
by kevin on July 28, 2022 at 16:39 and modified on July 28, 2022. at 16:40
Posted In: astronomy


This is Jupiter from the same morning as the Saturn post below. Tuesday 2022 July 26 at04:45 EDT or 08:45 UTC. Jupiter is at a much higher altitude than the last several years, and also much higher than Saturn. It is approaching its highest point but is competing against the rising brightness of the Sun.
The North Equatorial Belt (NEB) is narrow but dark in colour and contrast. No Great Red Spot is seen in this image but some smaller storms are seen on the NEB and the SEB.

This is an animation of all of the imaging runs from that night. The first two images in the run are only 30 second runs, resulting in only a thousand frames or so. There are two processed images of each frame, the best 10% and the best 25% of the run.
The processing workflow is:
firecapture .ser, autostakkert! v3 to png, registax wavelet processing, ImageMagick annotation and conversion to .gif and .mpg. Some dust spots are seen here as well.

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Saturn 20220726

Jul28
by kevin on July 28, 2022 at 16:31 and modified on July 28, 2022. at 16:51
Posted In: astronomy


Saturn on the morning of Tuesday 2022 July 26, at 04:28 EDT or 08:28 UTC.
I am still searching for a good reference to any of Saturn’s features, The Cassini Division is the biggest single feature on the whole image, dividing the rings into two distinct sections.
Some of the equatorial bands show around and above the equator. Several cloud bands are seen in various colours and brightness moving north.

This is an animation of all of the imaging runs from that night. The very first image has a wonderful dust spot. The first two images in the run are only 30 second runs, resulting in only a thousand frames or so. There are two processed images of each frame, the best 10% and the best 25% of the run.

The processing workflow is:
firecapture .ser, autostakkert! v3 to png, registax wavelet processing, ImageMagick annotation and conversion to .gif and .mpg

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Saturn 2022 July 23

Jul24
by kevin on July 24, 2022 at 09:45 and modified on July 24, 2022. at 09:48
Posted In: astronomy

Saturn is well placed in the morning sky after midnight, approaching opposition on 2022 August 14. At 01:00 EDT it will be at its highest altitude above the horizon, due south. Unfortunately Jupiter trails behind it, so by the time I am outside at 03:00 Saturn has already gone past its peak and has started to slip down into the west.

It is a compromise between planet positions and an astronomers ability to totally screw up their sleep cycles 🙂

This first image is my first of the evening, with incorrect settings 🙂 The gain on the camera was set much to high (normally I leave it alone, but it must have stuck from an earlier session). You can see the noise and the grain in the image. It was a 30 second run using the best 25% of 1453 frames.

The last image of the session is here below, the best 25% of 3833 frames with a much lower gain, much less noise and grain as a result.

My normal image processing routine has changed a little… in the past it went like this:
firecapture SER, PIPP AVI, autostakkert! v3 PNG, registax v6 wavelets, ImageMagick for annotation.
I was finding that PIPP was cropping well, but generating a file that was much larger than the original, even with substantial cropping. The benefit of cropping was to achieve a fixed pixel size image, ie 600×600, so that the annotation code could put text in the correct places around the target of the image.
I have reprogrammed the batch annotation scripts and so far they are working out with a variable size image. the new sequence of processing is:
firecapture SER, autostakkert! v3 PNG, registax v6 wavelets, ImageMagick for annotation.

Once finalized, the original source .SER video files (huge! tens of GBs!) are moved into an archive folder and every few months that archive folder is removed with the contents going to TWO external SATA drives, one primary, one backup, and put on shelves until needed next.

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acurite weather station kaput

Jul24
by kevin on July 24, 2022 at 08:37 and modified on July 24, 2022. at 08:39
Posted In: tech, weather


On July 18th our Acurite Pro (model 06004) (2019 November 27) weather station receiver went a little crazy. The data display continued fine but the lower display section started showing graphical patterns and would not respond to any button press.
We cycled the power, removed wall power and battery power, reset the unit, all several times. The unit powers back up in default imperial measurement mode, but again, no buttons can configure the units, date, time or USB mode for data transmission. New receiver units are a little pricey at this time so our weather station will stay offline for some time.

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