Jupiter and Saturn in moderate seeing

 My 3rd trip for this season and I have the right sleep patterns and routine for some early am efforts!  Saturn is at really wonky hour of the day and I get only <45min of it clearing the trees.  I'll have to wait to get more shots until it swings in the pre-midnight portion of the 2021 showing.

What's got me most excited is the automated animations that I'm popping out using batch processing in AS!3 and AstraImage with no tooling required.  The secret sauce is a custom python script that runs on Win10 in WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)  It takes all my captures, 10 or 30 or more, RGB combines them, plays with the levels if needed, stamps them with water mark and info and then spits out an animation!  I'll share more details at some point in future entries but do have them on my Github - https://github.com/maphilli14/Planetary-Win10 specifically the RBG-Imagemagik.py script!

Here's the Saturn and Jupiter animations!

At the point of the script ending I have a nice batch of short RGB's to pull the best out of an process fully.

Saturn

And with Jupiter slightly higher and closer to dawn this came out a bit better IMHO!

Fooling around with automation for animations!

 I had a bout of good enough seeing the other morning and have been working to refine my animation making abilities with python and WSL scripting!   This is a good result!

Why do you need to cool your mirror for high resolution imaging?

 This post, part 2 of my mirror cooling series will give evidence that a closed tube is not efficient at keeping the mirror at ambient temperature of the air.  For a 24 hour period my scope sat with the dust cap screwed on and a tarp covering the whole OTA assembly.  During this time you can see how much the mirror temp slowly follows the air temp.

 

 

In the above example you can see the symmetry of each temperature, following a cooling and warming curve with temperature on the Vertical/Y-axis and time on the Horizontal/X-axis.  Looking at the blue (air) you will see it cool from the left at midnight until about 11am where it starts to warm again in my garage, where it is parked.  If you focus on the yellow (mirror) temp curve you will see the same shape, just slightly phase shifted away.  This means that the mirror is also cooling but is delayed, likely as it's a larger heat sink than the air.  After 11am the air heats more rapidly than mirror, which again is slower to keep up with the changes in temperature.

Let's zoom into the times between 0245 and 0545, a THREE hour time span where if you focus your attention to the vertical and horizontal guides, the big dashed PLUS in the middle of the graph.  Following the horizontal line you'll see it intersect with the TOP part of the blue curve on the LEFT and the BOTTOM part of the yellow curve on the right.  This horizontal line represents the temp ~75.7F and is the time delta between the air and mirror at the same temperature.  Not using active cooling and only letting the scope and mirror follow thermodynamics you can see that the mirror, capped and closed inside the OTA took about 3 hours to catch up to the air. 

 

I wanted a temp comparison, so I created a graph showing the mirror and air delta for a visualization in real-time and record of what the differences in the below graph.  The idea is that I can use a large temp difference to activate the cooling unit I described in part 1 - Akule's updated cooling fans  The cooling unit was NOT used in any of these tests but the idea is that with a significant enough temp delta I can trigger the cooling unit to run when not in use

 I hope you enjoyed seeing real evidence of why you need active cooling!  See you in the next part!

Mike

Akule's updated cooling fans

 My telescope mirror is 15lbs of Pyrex glass and retains too much heat, so it has a custom TEC cooling system with fans, no big deal…( https://maphilli14.webs.com/apps/blog/show/21342955-akule-s-cooling )

The original fans are in the blog entry from the original creation of Akule in 2011 and I upgraded them in 2015 to these fans.

 

 

 

 

 

Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO!  But, sadly it's 2021 and I did this upgrade back in 2015 when one of the fans stopped working and I couldn't get a Rosewill replacement and I wanted the same CFM for balance across the plate.  I upgraded them all and while it's a bit heavier and I'm past the 65lbs limit of my CGE by far it's not been a terrible experience!

 

Here's a shot with old fan on Right and new on Left

 

 

Here's a close up of the bottom where the TEC cooler recesses into the plexiglass.

 

Why cool the heavy mirror?  It's #4 on my basics of high res planetary imaging - https://astromaphilli14.blogspot.com/p/seeing-collimation-and-focusing.html

 

"This means having no heat plumes inside your OTA that cause locally significant seeing issues.  It may be as simple as setting your scope outside a few hours before hand to help cool it.  The larger your mirror and the more closed your tube design the more help you'll need"

 

Next up in this multipart series is monitoring the temperature of the mirror relative to the air.  I used to use a nice indoor / outdoor thermometer but it broke!

 

First Saturn and Jupiter of 2021

 So, yes, they've moved further from each other compared to the Great Conjunction of 2020!  It's also one of the first times I've gotten up early in some years I think!  I had setup the perfect spot to dodge all the tree gaps and shot well into sunrise as you can see here.  On screen is Jupiter and the sun is also hitting the trees in the background!

Here's the mostly Average Saturn

Jupiter had some slightly better conditions and I did 4x DeRotate in WinJUPOS.  I processed with and without the sky background colors.

Thanks for reading!

Blog of pollen

 I live in Central North Carolina on the east coast of the USA at 35°N latitude.  In my portion of this world there's lots of trees!  LOTS of 🌳🌲🌲them!  Every year since I got my scope in 2006 and I've noticed it, but it wasn't until 2009-2014 (I can't find the original photo seen below) that I noticed how much collects on the tube and optics for even a few hours long session.  It's kept me indoor for 6+ weeks around this time of year.

Basically one year around the time I got my CGE in the background, I had the Orange C8 out for a while and it wasn't until the next day did I realize it was ALL over the tube and sadly the corrector plate as well!!!!  I was horrified and I'm so gun shy about it happening again!

Here's a good discussion about this topic on my FB from years later - https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10208538664082341&set=pb.1180477400.-2207520000..&type=3 

Also I had a bit of fun this year!

 

via - https://www.instagram.com/p/CNTFMOHJN4i/

 

So how to beat it?  I keep track of forecasts and keep my own tables. 

 Here's some other resources I found interesting and useful:

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article250526719.html

When is pollen the worst?

 

The N.C. Department of Environmental Quality measures pollen at the Nature Research Center in Downtown Raleigh. Typically, the highest counts are recorded between the last week of March and the second week of April, Zaynab Nasif, a DEQ spokeswoman, wrote in an email.

 

Predictions

https://www.accuweather.com/en/us/raleigh/27601/allergies-weather/329823?name=tree-pollen

3-5 showing in VISIBLY worst portions!

https://www.pollen.com/forecast/current/pollen/27604

 

 

I've also been keeping a chart that's mostly ambiguous but some form of a guide to go back out when it's safe again!

 

Year	Light Start	Heavy Start	Heavy End	Light End
2021	20210303	20210325
2020	20200302	20200309-16
2019	20190316	20190330
2018	20180329			20190519

Hope you have clear and steady skies!

Mike