Starship Asterisk*

[quote="mikeu"]After a great deal of delay, we now have the sky camera mounted on the roof. The images are not yet available live on the web. I tried to use the Night Sky Live software, however the tarball appears to be corrupted. I'm looking for an alternative method to process the images...

Yes, the Big Dipper is near the center. Polaris is up at the center, and the bright star at low-left is Arcturus.

Nice. I see you also caught a plane at the top right part of the pix, just coming out from behind to dome and above the trees.
Noah Brosch

If you cannot fit a rotating chopper, I suggest you consider a vibrating chopper. If in resonance this requires only low power and the the only thing you move is a thin pellicle

I am not familiar with this SBIG product, however the red filter is a good addition that would minimize moonlight and street light contamination. You would have to be careful with water on the window, either from dew condensation or from rain. I suggest mounting the enclosure with a slight inclinati...

Congratulations on the "first light". Could you post more details as what is this camera and how deep does it go?
Best,
Noah Brosch

[b]Unfortunately[/b], not much has happened. The culprit is the lack of sufficient manpower. We completed one camera and tested it at the Wise Observatory. The camera produces images with [u]significantly[/u] more stellar images than the CONCAM 2 we operate. However, my idea to protect the fisheye l...

The disk advantage is the on-line availability of the images and the reduction of hassle in mounting DVDs. One can now have 4x500 GB disks in a single enclosure, for a 2 TB storage (1 TB with redundancy). However, images grew as well. The CONCAM IV now in testing at the Wise Observatory produces ~13...

This is from a private Email exchange, but it might interest the forum thus it is put here as well: I checked the spec sheet for the StellaCam III with the cooler as posted at http://www.optcorp.com/product.aspx?pid=319-325-9051. These cameras look great for looking at deep sky objects, but I wonder...

[quote="tepickering"] playing with my brother's 3D gaming glasses got me thinking about liquid crystal shutters. the glasses aren't too expensive (<$100), are of reasonable optical quality, and can cycle at better than 100 Hz. putting something like this in the optical path of an integrati...

The Czech people, who do quite a lot of meteor imaging, use choppers on their large-frame photographic cameras quite successfully and have not reported problems with those. A chopper might work quite well if it is protected from the elements (i.e., located between the lens and the CCD). Since this l...

[quote="Chris Peterson"] I also have one camera that uses a Watec 902HS. With its 1/2" sensor the entire sky is imaged, although it adds about $170 to the cost of a station. For meteor detection you do not want an integrating camera like a StellaCam. You must collect true video (25/30...

Dear all: Following up on Bob's mailing, I am updating you on the status of the cameras we are building. We completed the hardware acquisitions except for a second computer and have a preliminary design that will be implemented on a first camera (mod. 1). If it will prove successful, we would copy i...

Bob, I do not think that with a meteor per night one could do much science. The passive radar, if it performs as well as regular radars, should yield hundreds of meteors per night but it would be somewhere within a few 100-km from the station. There would be no way of correlating optical with radar ...

Melissa: [quote="mgmeyer"] Actually, the passive radar I have been working on is not over-the-horizon. It's a line-of-sight VHF system -- which is currently implemented as a bistatic device, with the receivers separated by a few hundred km. The illumination is commercial FM radio stations,...

Bob, my guess is that there is no way to include a passive radar system in a CONCAM box. At most, one could fit a simple VHF receiver; these exist in really small sizes with only the antenna having a sizable dimension. However, once we start taking TDOF, interferometric systems, etc., both the recei...

I understand the problem of maintaining operations given the lack of funds and expert support from Lior Shamir. However, I do not think that you Bob should "close up shop". This is because (a) some funding may appear later along the road, and (b) another person with Lior Shamir's qualifica...

I am reproducing below a warning message regarding current solar activity. Some of this might be observable by the CONCAM/NSL network, so please do keep your eyes open. There is no reason why the cameras should not see the possible strong aurora. Cheers, Noah MIDDLE LATITUDE AURORAL ACTIVITY WARNING...

[quote="craterchains"]Might you try infrared heat directed at the dome, and or lenses? Or, would it cause interference with the CCD? It heats objects, not the air. Norval[/quote] The dome material is transparent to near IR thus it would not heat. A small fraction would be reflected by the ...

The Perseid meteor shower is predicted by IMO to peak on August 12 between 17UT and 19:30UT at a ZHR of about 100 and this is the best shower of 2005. By the time the radiant rises sufficiently, that is, by about 23:00 local, the waxing Moon will have set and its light would not interfere with viewi...

I found a link on the web describing "simple-minded" photometry that could be useful for CONCAM reductions. This was designed to work with a webcam attached to a telescope. I am aware, as should the potential users, that the weird shapes of the stellar images produced by CONCAMs make photo...

I do not think it is a head-on meteor, because it would have shown a definite trail from the other site. It could be a cosmic ray, and this could be checked by comparing its appearance with that of nearby stars of similar apparent brightness.

[quote="tilvi"][img]http://nightskylive.net/wo/wo050410/wo0 ... 94642p.jpg[/img][/quote]
Most likely this is an airplane. The wavy look comes because the plane did some manoevering with the lights on. You do not see the srobing because it was flying high and not very fast...

[quote="Pete Roebber"]Hello all, this is my first post to this group. I've been viewing APOD for a couple of years now but didn't know about this forum until I contacted Dr. Nemiroff with a question about his APOD post for NGC 3628. He referred me here. My question is as follows: I wondere...

Yet another observatory affected by LP. Sorry to hear about that, but thanks for getting back to me anyway, even if the news was bad. Has anyone asked the town if they would replace or at least shield the offending lights? We are doing this on a continuous basis. Previously, all the lights were mer...