Geo, Space, Data… Science
What follows is simply a step-by-step guide to setting up an ASCOM driver project with Visual Studio 2019 – mainly so that I don’t forget how to do it myself… Creating from an ASCOM template Install ASCOM and developer components. Start Visual Studio as admin Click on ‘Create a new project’ Search for ‘ascom’ in…
As part of an environmental monitoring system for an observatory, I wanted to include a measure of ambient light. Ostensibly, this is for safety reasons. However, I must admit that I really just want to see if I can (coarsely) measure sky brightness. There are a number of inexpensive light sensors available from AliExpress/Amazon. The…
Finding the stellar magnitude limit in an image is not necessarily as straightforward as it, at first, appears. I needed to come up with some non-hand-wavy numbers and thought, ‘No problem, this is easy.’ It turns out that I was wrong. At least for my imagery and what I wanted to say about it. The…
After building the Mark I cloud monitor, I realized that I really wanted something with power-over-ethernet (POE). The cheap network adapters that I use typically have an HR911105 (or similar) RJ45 connector which is not compatible with POE. I’ve looked but have yet to find any of these adapters with POE, so I decided to…
I’ve wanted to build a cloud sensor for years now, but never actually found the time to do it. So, after seeing IR sensors for something on the order of $5 a piece, I ordered a couple and thought that I’d give it a shot. This has undoubtedly been done by lots of other people,…
Most of my time is spent near London, Ontario (the other London) where the weather is, well, crap. During the summer months it can be decent with lots of clear (but short) nights but, in the winter, we can be blessed with weeks of overcast skies. And in between, the saddle seasons can be cool…
The situation was that there were three telescopes. Each with the same 20″ cellular mirrors but one with a slightly different cell than the other two. Two were easy to collimate while the third one could never be fully collimated. It appeared that there was a bit of astigmatism that was preventing easy collimation. So,…
My academic work focuses on meteors. Visual (and sometimes radar) observations of faint meteors. For this, the general requirement is a sensitive video-rate camera with a moderate field-of-view. The traditional solution (after eyes, photograpic plates, vidicon, etc. ) was to use an analogue security camera with low-light sensitivity. For many years, this was the Watec…