Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

After an annoying hockey game last(Monday) night (Boston lost), I attempted some imaging of Jupiter. After 30 minutes of attempting to obtain a successful alignment, i said nasty words and attempted three imaging runs, manually guiding for each of 30 sec, 30 sec and 120 sec. The telrad is still broken… sitting here at my desk awaiting some rewiring (I hope only rewiring!).

Just as the first run started, clouds had snuck in from the South. In any event, the GRS is apparent and these are the same registax wavelet settings as last time (even though I said I would reduce them a touch… haven’t gotten to that yet).

Apparent diameter is still sitting around 44 arcseconds and altitude was 33 degrees.

Also of note at 21:43 EDT I happened to look up to see *something* flaring brightly (brighter than Jupiter), overhead like an Iridium flare.. slow moving, I caught it near peak flare and then it faded quickly… only Heaven’s above did not list any. I then searched out all satellites but did not see a likely candidate.

Will have to check the main observatory clock against reference sources as well as the computers themselves to see if all are on the same time page as it were.

This is another good imaging run on Friday evening, 2017 April 14th. Only 12 runs done and the third one needs some trimming as Jupiter hit an edge of the Field of View. Pointing was off by 10+ degrees and tracking was so poor it required almost constant correction. Had to use a replacement telrad that was not calibrated to this scope either

In any event, the GRS was finally in view! Always nice to see. A lot of detail with seeing and transparency being about average.

I’ve changed the aspect ratio of the processed image from about 1 to about 0.8, ie from 400×400 to 400×050, in order to get better results when printing to 4″x6″ photos.

This run I used the same registax settings the run from Thursday night, and yet they look way more overprocessed.. ie artificially high contrast. I may redo them to lessen the effects next time around.

The best image was from just after midnight, the 2nd one, exposure times were down to 40ms as Jupiter climbed higher.

Another long day, but the skies had cleared and KAON ran a little late. Managed to get the observatory open on this, the Opposition of Jupiter around 22:42 EDT Saturday night.

There were some pointing and tracking issues, then two alignments and then we had some good imaging. Seeing and transparency were both poor. The almost full moon was close by as well.

In the end about 32 imaging runs were completed. I noticed that after the roof is opened, focusing done and image runs start, the focus tends to change. I suspect the telescope is cooling to outside ambient, even if only -5 or -10C relative. At the end of the runs, I refocused for the final image and it turned out to be pretty good, relatively speaking.

And there are still spots on the optics, even more than before the last cleaning! Luckily seeing was so bad that the image bounced around a lot, and did not allow the optical spots to stay in one place for long.

Packed it in around 00:33 as mine eyes would not stay open anymore. Still trying to catch up on rest since then.

No GRS.. it would not transit until 4 hours later. Which means it was just about to appear when I packed it in!

None of the 4 moons were close enough to appear in the frame.

Jupiter was 39 deg high approx 44.3 arc seconds large and close enough to transit that staying up for another 30 minutes would not have made that much difference (at least thats what I keep telling myself!).

Azimuth was 167 degrees and it would have transited (180 degree) at 01:04 . If I am doing my math correctly (and correct me if I am wrong), 180-167=13 deg. cosine of 13 deg= 0.974

So I figure there would be about 3% less atmosphere to look though if I had waited until transit.

Reviewing the allsky cameras this morning to find this fantastic overhead fireball from Allsky2!

Travelling southwest to northeast

That was at 06:23:31 EDT this morning, just minutes before we left the house

That is the moon in the lower left, Jupiter in the lower right. The ISS made a low level pass near Jupiter just a few minutes later, at 06:33 EDT, which we did see.

starlightcascade.ca/allsky2/specialevents/ev_20170322_102331A_10A.png

Updated 20170323: Many reports now from the
http://www.amsmeteors.org/members/imo_view/event/2017/1071
site. One photo from Toronto. 34 reports so far.

Now listed in the special events section of the webpage:
/allsky2/

Updated: 20170328 – added this still image to the AMS event 1071 report. Now more than 56 reports.