occultation recording with SharpCap

[Jean-Francois]

Hello,

And Christian ? Do you observe the occultation this morning ?

I do the observation during the full night (clear sky, around 1°C and 90% humidity) ... but without observation of the occultation.
But I'm not 100% sure that I have nothing in my data ... maybe somebody with experience can says something

I mount 2 telescopes with each a different camera on my EQ8-Rh mount.
Telescope 1: Newton 10"/F4 with reducer to FD=2.8 and QHY-174-GPS
Telescope 2: RASA8 with QHY-183
I control both cameras and the telescope with my EAGLE2.
I start SharpCap 2 times ... and I connect the QHY-174-GPS camera with the first ScharpCap and the QHY-183 with the second SharpCap.
I used the GPS time synchronization of the computer from the GPS window. The computer was with ~ +/- 5 ms synchronized with the GPS signal of the camera. One SharpCap does the connection to the mount via SynScan driver and to the focuser.
I control the EAGLE2 computer from a laptop outside or from a desktop computer from inside with an Ethernet/remote connection.

I do the processing of the GPS camera film (image below), but it was until this evening not possible to process the film from the QHY-183 camera.
Tangra does not shows the curves after the targets centroid processing (It is maybe a known problem). It will be interesting to process the second camera for confirmation.

Concerning my observation (or no observation) ... something is visible at the calculated time (from 02:51:25 to 02:51:35, centered 02:51:30).

TNO-84522_Newton2.jpg (620.54 KiB) Viewed 1268 times

Regards,
Jean-Francois

[Jean-Francois]

Hello,

I find a way to process the film done with my QHY-183 camera.
With Tangra, I convert the ADV film in a sequence of FITS images. The processing of the FITS images was possible ... but, I have no positive occultation and I can not see the same pattern at 02:52:30 time.

BUT ... I detect a problem with the ADV file ... each FITS image after the conversion has the same date/time in the header: 2010-01-01T00:00:00.000

The question is ... does the ADV individual image (header) a date/time coming from the computer time ?
Or is it necessary to activate the Timestamp on the image ?

Good night,
Jean-Francois

[kepler64]

just to conclude the thread. My observation of the occultation by 2002TC302 worked perfectly from a technical standpoint but the observer failed. I had preprogrammed the sequence and went to bed after checking everything shortly after midnight. The alarm clock ringed at 3.30 and a few minutes later I had a quick look at the telescope. It was perfectly clear, no fog (the weather service predicted fog). But OMG, I had forgotten to switch on the dew cap heater... A thick crust of frost stubbornly resisted the last second heating attempts. So automating the dew cap heater is one of the next projects...
I just learned that the lucky star prediction with the more southernly path was more on spot so nobody observed the occultation in Germany.

Markus

[procyon12]

Hi Jean-Francois, all,

Yes, I could also observe using a mobile station 10" + QHY174GPS, fits-sequence 150ms: no event detected (and very tired yesterday...).

From your Newton-picture I do not see evidence for an occultation - and now you confirm this from your second record. However, also these negatives are of high relevance, please report to the planoccult list. Finally there were at least 135 stations, first results are here: http://www.euraster.net/results/2021/in ... 1111-84522.

Regarding your adv-record: Tangra should read it in the right way including timestamps. (Also PyMovie can read it. I can recommend to install PyMovie and PyOTE https://occultations.org/observing/software/pymovie/.) Tangra adv-to-fits conversion should work and the fits files should have time headers. For this it is not required to have on screen time stamping enabled. I cannot say what was wrong. If you cannot solve it you may upload the adv to somewhere, I'll have a look on it.

Cheers

Christian

@ Markus: Just now I see your post - sorry for you ...