This being the summer and all, the May meeting of the Lennox and Addington Horticultural Society went on a garden field trip to Bloomfield Ontario, about 40 minutes out of Napanee in Prince Edward County, just west of Picton.
It was nice to get out and see a flower garden and get ideas from it as well.
We will have a few pictures here later on.
Too bad we arrived around 6pm for a 6:30 tour start, all of the tourist stores had closed 🙁
It was a great Victoria Day long weekend. In some ways too short.. in other ways.. good that it did not last longer. If it did you would have more time to work on projects around the house.
In any event, we finished off many projects waiting for this time off combined with nice weather, including more plantings in the garden, staining the exposed portion of decks, the creek footbridge, placing 150′ of deer fence around the gardens and much much more.
It is now time to concentrate on the astronomy side of things, what with the Transit of Venus coming up in 14 days.
We tested out a borrowed Meade Electronic Eyepiece and after figuring
out that it needed a 9vdc battery, we got it connected to a composite
video to USB converter (which installed its drivers for Windows 7 without any problem) and ran the video into handyavi software to attempt to capture some.
It is a monochrome camera with a dial switch with brightness control.
After trying to use it on both a Coronado solarmax and a thousand oaks
filtered scope, we gave up without any usable images. Research after
showed that it is the equivalent of a 4mm eyepiece. Very high
magnification, much more difficult to focus, and on a non tracking
scope, we could never get the sun centred in time before it moved out of
alingment.
The B&L SchmidtCass that we tried it on had a focal length of
1200mm/4=x300!
I think we will try again with the tracking Meade DS90 with a smaller FL
of 800mm = x200!
The endpoint of all of this is to get a complete video through a
filtered scope of the Transit of Venus that is mostly standalone and can
be viewed in realtime.
These images are of a new self storing baader solar film filter design.
In preparation for the Lennox and Addington Horticultural Society Plant Sale on Saturday May 26th, 2012 at the Napanee Farmers Marker, we have planted some items for sale.
The sale starts at 9:00am
Tiny Tim
Kellogg’s Breakfast
Earliest and Best
Brandywine
Fireball
Amish Paste
Flowers: Bachelor’s Buttons and Marigolds!
Hi everyone,
On March 22, 2012, the KFL&A Healthy Eating Working Group hosted a Food Charter feedback meeting for key decision makers and leaders from various organizations. The purpose of this meeting was to receive feedback on the draft Food Charter for Kingston, Frontenac and Lennox & Addington.
The next step for the KFL&A Healthy Eating Working Group is to bring the draft Food Charter to the community for their review and feedback. During the last two weeks of May 2012, the KFL&A Healthy Eating Working Group will be hosting Food Charter Visioning Sessions. These sessions will take place in Kingston, Napanee and Verona. We have attached a poster which contains more information about the date and time of the sessions. You can also visit the website below for more details. Please circulate this email among your networks. We can provide print copies for those who are interested in displaying the poster at your organization.
We welcome you to attend these sessions and look forward to keeping you abreast of our activities.
KFL&A Healthy Communities Partnership
If you have any questions about the Food Charter Visioning Sessions, please contact Rachael Goodmurphy by phone 613-549-1232, ext 1630 or by email at Rachael.Goodmurphy@kflapublichealth.ca
Lennox Agricultural Society Plant Sale
(not to be confused with the Lennox and Addington Horticultural Society Plant Sale)
Saturday, May 12th, 2012 8 am – 3 pm
Napanee Fairgrounds, 170 York Street, Napanee
The time has come to plant your gardens, and there’s no better place to get your supplies than at the Lennox Agricultural Society Plant Sale. There’s lots of annuals and perrenials to choose from. There will be coffee, cookies and muffins available. All proceeds go to the agricultural building. If you have any plants, gardening tools, pots, gardening books or decorative garden items to donate, please contact Betty Austin at 613-388-1105.
Our seed potatos from last fall were too eager to get into the ground… long long roots growing even when being stored in our dark cool cold room. Enough was enough and they had to go in the ground.. and so they did on Saturday May 5th, 2012.
We have 16 types this year including:
1) Norgold russett
2) Epicure
3) Irish Cobbler
4) Caribe
5) Bluenose
6) Warba
7) Superior
8) Norland
9) Carola
10) Morning Glory
11) Brigus
12) Russian Blue
13) Green Mountain
14) White Rose
15) Blue Victor
16) Yukon Gold
Each get at least five hills, some up to ten.
They are planted in Veg beds #4A and 4B, totaling about 350 ft^2.
We added type #17, five hills of Kennebec on May 20th.
Last night was the year’s largest and brightest moon.
It was in fact bright. It washed out most of the nights allsky camera imagery. But at 04:34 this morning (Sunday May 6th, 2012) it did pick up something that I hope is not just a lens flare from the moon.
What looks like a very bright meteor in the north northwest flared across at least 20 degrees of sky.
For the last 5 days now, our automated routines for copying data from home up to this starlightcascade web server have failed.
We are using linux fedora 15 and a client program called lftp to push files up on regular schedules to a server running linux fedora 16 and a server side program called vsftpd.
The system has been running flawlessly for some years and now we are plagued by partial connections, timeouts and no files transferred.
Instead of very fast uploads completed we are sitting at
`index2.htm’ at 0 (0%) [Sending data]
for minutes on end.
Computers at both ends have been restarted. The house router and switches have been restarted.
We’ve tried other ftp clients like Filezilla from other systems within the house. Same problems.
We’ve tried FTPing to other servers in the same area as this one. Same problems.
What’s left? Did the Internet Service Provider change something?
More tests continue along with some alternative methods such as using rsync will be coming up.
Depending of course if there is any time left in the day… Game of Thrones is on tonight 🙂
On Monday April 30th, 2012
7 of us planted 8 more rows in the community garden.
Row 11: lettuce starts (chefs choice) plus spinach seed to complete the row
Row:12: spinach seed, and lettuce seed (north pole – head)
Row 13: onions
Row 14: peas (dakota?)
Row 15: peas
Row 16: beets (early wonder)
Row 17: beets
Aurora from the International Space Station - NASA
“Noon approached on September 1, 1859, and British astronomer Richard Christopher Carrington was busy with his favorite pastime: tracking sunspots”
It is now May 1st, 2012. Last night’s low temperature of 7 deg C was the warmest we have had in weeks.
The night before was -5. All of this cold weather has taught us… do not put out the garden hoses so early! This is about the 4th occurance of a leak, split hose, split nozzle or split metal ring pieces in the hoses this spring. Arrggg.
Thanks to our friendly neighbour who keeps coming over to turn off the tap when they see streams of water pouring out of the system.
As inconvenient as it may be, we will have to leave the system off in the spring and fall when there is a danger of frost, when not in use. Period.
It was International Astronomy Day on Saturday April 28th, 2012 and members and friends of The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada – Kingston Centre were out in force at Confederation Basin in front of Kingston City hall from 1 to 3 pm.
We were observing the sun with solar filters and the 4 or 5 groups of sunspots on it. There was a lot of cloud coming and going and in some cases the sunspots did disappear.
We were also passing out Transit of Venus glasses along with a brochure reminding people of the Tuesday June 5th, 2012 event. RASC Starfinders and Moon Gazers were also passed out.
The telescopes on set were: Coronado Solarmax 60, Corondao PST, a Meade DS90 with a Baader film filter, a Bausch & Lomb Schmidt-Cassegrain with a Thousand Oaks filter, a Meade SC with a baader film filter.
Good location, traffic came in groups on a cold windy day. Surprisingly we had many tourists from out of town including overseas and the United States.
Total guest count was 74.