Starship Asterisk*

Tilvi, This sounds great, and very important too. I have the following comments: 1. I believe that the light curve should be different for almost each meteor. The reason is that unlike stars, the light curve of a meteor is affected by the angle of the meteor towards the camera. For instance, if the ...

Thanks, this is just what I've been looking for. Unfortunately, when I try to use it on Windows 2000 Professional, it installs fine, but the little wallpaper window shows only the words "Astronomy Picture of the Day" and a link to the Explanation, without showing the picture itself. If I ...

Our software (downloaded from nightskylive.net domain) is perfectly clean from spyware, adware or badware of any kind, and is not hacked in any way. Being aware of the fact that some web sites have listed this software, we strongly recommend to download the software from the nightskylive.net domain ...

A new APOD software is available for Astronomy Picture of the Day fans. This software automatically brings Astronomy Picture of the Day to the desktop, along with the picture explanation. It is usefull, and also sets a new beautiful astronomy wallpaper every day. Of course, it is free, and does not ...

gpp wrote:I think the explanation is below:

http://www.wolkenatlas.de/wolken/wo06947.htm

Rgds,

GPP 8)

And there is an English version right here:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020417.html

It seems that we have some moisture problems:

http://nightskylive.net/hl/hl040912/hl0 ... 35550p.jpg

Nothing unexpected about that. Some stations like Siding Spring and Canary Islands use domes to protect the stations from getting wet.

They are very close to the moon. We have seen some artifacts near the moon, but these are different.

For some strange reason KP is up again.

The thing is that the computer boots itself every night. If the computer still works, then this shouldn't be the problem. I hope there is no network problem there.

Not so fast Tilvi. The station seems to be indoors and does not have a clear view of the sky. Besides, many of the featured are not yet enabled. I will enable them as soon as we get good pictures.

Vic, This problem is pretty well known. The storage capacity of the server is not unlimitted. We use a tower of scsi hard drives which is constantly being upgraded, but still cannot provide a much longer period than what is currently provided. I would suggest not to rely on the storage policy only, ...

Got to be airplanes, but we don't usually get too many of them at Siding Spring.

I didn't realize that the sunset switch is already installed. That is excellent.

Tilvi, Algol (beta Per) would be a much better target because it is not so bright, and the variability amplitude is much larger. Algol varies between 2.2 and 3.5, the eclipses are deep with a period of 68 hours and 49 minutes and the width of the primary eclipse is about 8 hours. NoahBrosch It is a...

Vic Muzzin wrote:The South Africa CONCAM seems to have resumed operation on 8/26/2004 at 20:42.

Right. But it is still not in a steady state. It will take a while until the sunset switch is installed. The sunset switch is the only effective protection against the extreme heat of the desert.

Comparing two frames might be effective, but as you mentioned, we might loose meteors. Since in most cases we can easily tell if a PSF is a cosmic ray hit or a true astronomical object, I believe this can also be done by machines. The current algorithm has a high level of accuracy (much more than 90...

Cosmic rays can be very annoying also in dark frames. The problem is that they might cause changes in the counts in the subtracted dark frames. We have now a cosmic ray detection mechanism that is about to be completed. This mechanism can be used in order to eliminate cosmic rays not only from the l...

In order to take shorter frames and still maintain the 3:56 cycles, it is optional to perform exposure of around 1:50. This is not possible with our current SBIG CCD model, but a USB interface should allow this for the newer models. In this case, we might need a faster processor in order to make it ...

In order to connect a concam node to the NSL network, a static IP that is publicly visible is should be assigned to the CONCAM computer. In order to operate the system, the firewall (if one is used) should open ports for ssh and scp (used for file transfering to the server). If ssh or scp cannot wor...

http://nightskylive.net/mk/mk040811/mk040811ut145459p.jpg This is a much clearer one with a longer tail coming directly from Pereseus, captured by a 20 second exposure frame (what makes it possibly fainter?) Unlike the one above, examining the fits frame shows that this one flashes first, and than ...

WOLF has just started to analyze magnitude changes in CI, and with the addition of the cosmic rays elimination the output seems to be effective. Checking the output might be a time-consuming task, but I hope that this application will turn to be cost-effective overall, since the probablity for disco...

Few months ago, we implemented an algorithm for automatic luminance changes in Canary Islands CONCAM. The main problem with the algorithm that cosmic rays gave too much noise. Recently, a new fuzzy-logic based algorithm for cosmic rays detection has been implemented. It is not fully optimized yet, b...

tilvi wrote:

RJN wrote:The Canary Island (CI) CONCAM3 has been running very well since the start of 2004.

13:45 East; Aug 08.

Is CI and KP down?

No. Both stations are currently running, and have been running very well in the last few months. I don't see any problem with these two.

These guys implemented a similar application for their astronomical images. I will look more into it to find the details of how they did it.
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