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COVID meant that I was at home a lot more than I would normally have been, particularly in the Spring and early summer when the weather was excellent. I managed to do some imaging on 170 nights in 2020 (compared to 90 in 2019). Some of this was due to the better weather but most was due to the fact that I was around to use the telescope! Less subjectively the number of sporadic meteors picked up by my two meteor cameras remained similar to previous years (see the graph below).
There were many observing highlights in 2020. Sitting out in wonderful weather each evening in the spring and early summer watching Venus gradually sink into a contrail-free twilight, capturing an outburst of comet 29P just a few minutes after it had started, watching the breakup of C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) in night after night of clear skies and then, of course, there was the wonderful C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) in July. One of my most memorable nights was on July 11/12 when that beautiful comet was joined by bright NLCs on a perfect summer evening. Sadly, the following week I should have been on La Palma and I wonder what comet images I would have got from there but COVID put paid to that.
Finally, at the end of the year, I was amazingly privileged to see the December 14 Total Solar Eclipse from Argentina as one of less than 100 foreigners let into the country. Many thanks to AstroTrails for managing to arrange that despite the international travel situation.
All-in-all a very memorable year from an astronomical viewpoint but I do hope that things start to get back to normal in 2021. I do miss travel and pubs and all the things of normal daily life that we used to take for granted.
Yes, clear at the Astro Trails site in Argentina. Fantastic view although a bit windy. https://britastro.org/observations/observation.php?id=20201214_214258_b6606c0d197cc531
Hi Graham, I can’t speak for other sections but as far as the Comet Section is concerned you should continue to submit images directly (info on how to do that is here). Once they’ve been checked the images will then appear in the Comet Section archive here, and through Dominic’s coding magic, they will also appear in the new gallery.
It certainly looks optical rather than electronic to me. I can’t think how an electronic failure could cause this. Could it be frost forming on the sensor? That is normally only a temporary problem but I can’t think of anything else that would have such a weird effect.
Thanks for all the links and references. I hadn’t realised that the Solar atmospheric “tides” were actually thermal rather than gravitational unlike the lunar one which is definitely gravitational or that the solar tides lead to small (mm) deformations in the solid body of the earth. Yet another small cause of the increase in day length. Anyway, I have a big dataset and will write some code to do a proper analysis of this for the sun and moon and see what I can find.
There is an interesting comparison between Arecibo and the Goldstone Solar System Radar (GSSR) here. Both have humongous EIRP but Arecibo just wins (or won) out. The GSSR has a 500 kW X-band (8.5 GHz) klystron into the DSS-14 70m dish which works out at around 130 dBW EIRP. Arecibo had 1MW at S-band (2.5 GHz) into a 305m dish so around 136 dBW. Any radio engineer will tell you a) that is a lot and b) don’t stand in front of it. Puerto-Rico has fewer aircraft passing over that might enter the beam so it was easier to schedule operations there but DSS-14 can point whereas Arecibo can’t (much). DSS-14 is still a critical element of the Deep Space Network so has a lot of money invested in it.
That’s a great video although I think my neighbours would complain if I built one of those in the garden. The drawings are really nice to look at and are a great continuation of the historical record with that tower. It’s a shame that they will probably stop when Steve is unable to make that rather hairy looking journey up in the basket.
My image from just now (Nov 26.76) is on my members page here. It is just saturating in a 10s exposure but the unfiltered magnitude looks to be around 9.3.
I don’t have any experience with Canon mirrorless cameras but I have a Sony A7 and it works very well. I have got used to the fact that I have to turn the camera on to see things through the viewfinder and you get a lot of image sensor are in a very lightweight body. The very short back focus is also nice since, with a suitable adaptor, you can use some very good, old prime lenses that you can’t use on EF mount cameras. It is worth noting that you will need an adaptor to use your existing EF lenses on this camera since the EF-M lens mount on the mirrorless cameras is designed for much shorter back focus lenses. I hope that the Canon mirrorless cameras use the same raw format as their DSLRs do. It is a well designed format that is really raw. The Sony raw format is absolute rubbish.
Paul is right that there will be lots of opinions. Here is mine based on many years of imaging work.
My calibration steps involve having a library of dark frames of different exposures so that I never have to scale darks. Since I don’t scale my darks I don’t need bias frames. I generate the darks when it is cloudy and generally average 30 – 100 raw dark frames at each exposure to get my library dark (I do 5, 10, 15, 30, 60, 120, 300s darks). My camera has good temperature regulation and so I can use dark frames from 6 months ago and they are fine. If you have a CMOS camera you probably will find that scaling darks is not always successful so, again, it is a good reason to keep a library of darks at different exposures rather than trying to scale them.
I have always used sky flats, again taking 30 – 100 raw flats, subtracting the flat dark and then normalizing and averaging them to get the master flat. Since the right conditions for making twilight flats don’t come along very often I tend to re-use flats for a month or so. I’m lucky, I have a permanent observatory and the camera never comes off the telescope but new dust spots appear with monotonous regularity. You can see an example of that in the lower right of this image.
When you do the averaging is best if you can use floating point format output FITS files rather than 16-bit integers. This applies both for the calibration frames (flats, darks) and for your final stacked images. Certainly don’t using summing with integer files since you will end up saturating brighter stars as their summed pixels hit 2^16.
I’d just like to emphasise Jeremy’s comments. Ultimately it would be good to aim to get some filters but proper photometric filters are very expensive and a lot of work can be done without them or even using the much cheaper filters designed for colour imaging.
If you are interested in trying something slightly different you might want to look at our project to monitor the comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann. Have a look here for details. This comet is well placed at the moment and normally sits around mag 16-17 but it can flare up and catching the eruptions early is very important. Richard Miles runs this project on behalf of the comet section. It might be a little faint for your kit but try some images of the field and see what you get.
It is a real shame that we have got to this point but I think it reflects the fact that many people now expect to be able to browse the web and get information for free. Most sources of quality journalism are suffering the same fate. Some publishers have embraced the low-cost route but many of their current books look like printed versions of someone’s web page.
The Internet has been, generally, a great force for good but quality publishing has taken a big hit. I’m not so sure that the democratisation of news and comment has been a particularly positive thing either.
Here is one of the superhumps from tonight. Unfortunately the sky clouded over at the end of this run.
I get 14.87 tonight (2020-11-10.8) which is the brightest I’ve seen it. All of my recent obs are in the VSS database.
This was my first opportunity to image the field. The sky was transparent but the Moon was bright and the wind was strong. Quite a lot of my subframes were badly trailed but this is what I managed to recover. The nova would be in the blue circles, comp stars are in the red circles. This is an unfiltered image referenced to Gaia DR2 G.
Alex,
Did it give that number to 6 significant figures too?
I would take that 15 arcsec with a rather large pinch of salt and it would certainly get you into a religious argument with certain people. I remember an endless discussion with a certain Mr. CJRL on this subject many years ago.
At that level of precision people will also argue about whether you should point the polar axis at the refracted pole or the true pole (they are around 50″ apart at 52N) or somewhere between the two. Even tiny amounts of differential thermal expansion can move the polar axis by many arcsec. I suppose at least Leeds doesn’t have many earthquakes to worry about.
This is in one of my lesser patrolled fields around M31 (my field 15). I try to get a deep image of the core of M31 every available night but I’ll keep an eye on this field too. Nothing there at the moment.
