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As far as I understand it, about 10 mins after launch the second stage separates from the dragon capsule. Presumably, it then lags behind steadily as drag and the capsule thrusters start to do their thing. So, by the time they pass over us it would be quite a big separation. Anyone any ideas how big?
I’m wondering what lens to use to get both. As I’m only using a tripod, I’m assuming something like a 85-135mm with a short exposure and high ISO to avoid tralling.
This is going to be fun. 🙂
PS I believe that on this variant of the system the solar panels are actually fix mounted on the vehicle and do not deploy.
That looks like a rather nice way to spend some time this evening.
Now we just need good weather here and at Canaveral. 🙂
I’m with Callum on this, buy a cheap 32 bit used laptop for £60 and use that to run the camera only?
Have you established why the adaptors do not work?
Daniel Parrott, the US developer of Tycho Tracker, has just released another version of Tycho Tracker. As before, the best way of using it is via GPU – the good news is that it now lets you test the GPU you have installed and tells you if its compatible. If its not the right sort (or capable enough) the CPU option is still there.
A friend had trouble using the GPU version under a Linux Windows emulator (wine?) but now theres a CPU version that problem may not apply. I tried it on 22x 4min Starlight H18 frames of the ecliptic taken with an 11″ RASA and it found 5 asteroids on the frame (and identified them) and in addition a single unknown object down at mag 19 – that looked real to me. It wasnt quick (5.5hrs) but I set Tycho running when I went to bed and looked at the results as I munched my muesli the next morning.
Its fairly straight forward to use and there is a manual. A full licence is $US 25 but you get a month to play with it before having to decide.
I’m sure we will get many such opportunities over the next decade.
Anyone any idea what the system lifetime is? Though if they make money they will of course lob up replacements for those descending.
Hope to have a bash at the weekend – by which time I hope to have found the Lithium grease I bought a couple of years back.
The downside of being home for 2 weeks is l run out of excuses as to why I have not done the outstanding DIY jobs around the house…
I purchased 4x SKF 608 2RSH bearings for the worms. Hopefully, they will do the job.
Had heard the large bearings were best cleaned up rather than replaced. You hear stories of swarf and misplaced paint in EQ6 bearings, so a good clean may well be needed. I’m certain I have some lithium grease around here somewhere.
The PE for the mount has always been rather noisy with the occasional big unpredictable spike which meant 10 minute exposures often had elongated stars. Normally 5mins is sufficient, but it would be nice to have the option of 10 minutes for narrow band filtered images.
Sounds very hopeful – I’m not finding many people saying “No, don’t bother” so I have decided to go ahead. Thats going to knacker the kitchen table for a couple of days….
Yeah a MyT or Ioptron60 would be the obvious alternative but this option is a lot cheaper, so I will see how it goes – and report back.
Version 5.3 was released this week. You don’t need a GPU to run it, but it will be slow. But, we all have lots of spare time at home suddenly….
Also, as feedback, you will find that it doesnt seem to like pre-2015 GPUs – even with the latest CUDA drivers.
Thanks for the info. How long did it take you? I could be in trouble if the kitchen table is a telescope mount for more than a day or two…
I will probably take the opportunity to do a general strip down….
Oh. Not exactly quiet yet, is it?
I was supposed to be going to one of the Scottish islands for my wedding anniversary and first Flybe went under and then Loganair cancelled my flight from Glasgow, so I had figured things were a bit quieter than that.
During the period when the volcano Eyjfjallajokull was blowing its top in Iceland and flights over the UK were closed down, we had a surprising run of clear night when a high pressure occurred. It will be interesting to see if that sort of thing repeats.
Its interesting that Wikipedia cite SpaceX as identifying a possible $30B market for Starlink services. So, given a toss up between his company making ludicrous mounts of cash (3:1 return on investment) and saving astronomy which do you reckon he will go for?
Starlink might better be advertised as ” Enabling rural gamers”.
Shame PPARC (now STFC) cannot get a royalty for the use by SpaceX of the name of their late lamented Starlink astronomy software project.
I particularly like it when, at work, other members of staff tell me my code isn’t written in the Python style and dismiss working, structured, debugged and documented code as somehow flawed.
I have twice had to demonstrate that doing image processing without using a linked list is generally faster and uses a lot less memory: which makes a big difference when you have a runtime greater than a few minutes.
I was forced to use Python at work after IDL licences were deemed too expensive and Matlab was clearly next on the chopping block. The libraries it has are great. The language itself, sucks.
It won’t be elegant or finished for a few days – I’m bug hunting at the moment – but it will be a single self contained file (probably 1800 lines or so). Mainly uses standard stuff like numpy. I’m running it under Anaconda.
May be able to improve the speed and memory usage yet. As far as possible I’m avoiding the temptation to resample images using splines or similar when I translate them to try to avoid the blurring/smearing that causes and maximise pixel counts. Happily, with well set up mounts the rotation isnt much. I’m doing integer shifts and translates where I can.
Python does gobble the memory though – havent checked yet but its probably converted the images to floating point or 64bit ints or something silly.
I got bored last night and so had a quick go at implementing a barebones blind stacking process that was totally self contained and and didnt use GPUs (not an area of programming I have ever had cause to venture into). To keep it simple I used Python3. It was able to stack a 60x 1Mpixel image set on a given drift/rotation rate in about 5-6seconds. So if you are wanting thousands of them, be prepared to wait thousands of seconds.
If you’ve a spare desktop knocking about then you can just start it running and come back in a few hours. Not a big deal.
Tycho wins though on being: 1, fast 2, fully integrated 3, largely already debugged and tested.
I think Python is part of the Linux install these days isnt it, so you can have some fun.
Its not that hard to do, you just have to be willing to throw CPU at the problem and wait. 🙂
But looking more closely at the manual, its obvious the author has put in some considerable effort. So, I think I will have a rummage around and see if I have a compatible old GPU knocking about. Could be fun.
Its not exactly an expensive licence afterall.
