Lego Project

The very simple project I thought up a week or so ago, which was to build something that uses every single one of my Legos.  This project has now exploded / expanded a little bit.  My primary focus is to see how well I can create an automatic Lego piece sorting machine.  This is the first step:

Thinking Lego.  Writing code this weekend to number the objects (tagging) seen in this image.  I probably won't get it done.  Identifying and tagging pieces, and then classifying and sorting them according to various rules will come later.  I plan to use 'Deep Reinforcement Learning', which is a multi-level neural network that operates by maximizing a reward parameter.

Why are there no Lego automatic sorting machines that actually work and will sort in many different ways?????

There are quite a few ways to sort Legos.  I need to come up with at least a few ways so that when I'm ready to starting working on that part I will have thought about it a little beforehand.

One of the interesting tangents is looking at the color information in an interesting way.  Each channel: red, green, and blue, can have a value between 0 and 255 for each pixel.  So I can create a histogram of the distribution of red, green, and blue of any image.  The plots below use the left image above as input.  I can also look at the distribution of red+green (yellow), red+blue (violet), and green+blue (cyan).  I can plot these distributions with the y-axis being a logarithmic scale, and I get this:

Here's the same data on a linear scale:

But that's just a nice tangent, which might be helpful for training the neural net.

Starting Soon

I should also mention that this observing program begins on Monday, 20 April 2020.  That's pretty much the first day that Jupiter and Saturn are sufficiently high in the sky (about 20 degrees elevation and rising) to get some decent data.  Saturn will still be a little low at first, but it's right there so why not?

I also made a list of eclipse events for HW Vir, which is currently my favorite EB system.  Here they are for the next week or so that I'll be able to see between 10h and 11h UTC:

S 20 Apr 2020 10:52
P 21 Apr 2020 10:41
S 22 Apr 2020 10:29
P 23 Apr 2020 10:18
S 24 Apr 2020 10:07
S 27 Apr 2020 10:57

where 'P' and 'S' are Primary eclipse and Secondary eclipse.

I'm observing between 10 and 11h UTC because that's when Saturn and Jupiter are up.  Iapetus will be in a perfect location (almost as far away from Saturn as it can be):


The reason I need Iapetus to be far away from Saturn is that 1 or 2 second exposures are required for this target.  It's a faint visual magnitude 12.  Doing that long of an exposure with Saturn in the FOV probably wouldn't hurt the CCD, but wow it would be incredibly overexposed.  So all of this data will not include Saturn, but will hopefully contain a bright reference star most of the time.  Iapetus is sufficiently far away from Saturn during most of its orbit to make this project possible.

If I get other moons in the FOV, that'll be bonus.

Research Direction(s)

Iapetus: photometric light curve (brightness versus orbital phase, brightness versus time)

Galilean moons: photometric light curves (brightness versus orbital phase, brightness versus time)

Eclipsling binary star systems: topic TBD

For the moon photometry, the idea is to keep the data collection short and sweet.  There's no particular reason to sit on the targets more than about 10 minutes.  That'll allow me enough time to get a decent statistical sample while all the moons are at a single orbital phase.  So observing Saturn and Jupiter will literally take about 30 minutes plus setup time.

Along with that, I'll collect photometric data on a selection of eclipsing binary stars.  I just got the ebook: "Eclipsing Binary Stars: Modeling and Analysis" by Josef Kallrath and Eugene F. Milone.  It seems comprehensive enough to be able to give me a pretty decent idea about what direction I want to take and what data will have to be acquired either by myself or from various surveys.

The computer saga: Let me tell you a computer story.  About two years ago I bought a fairly new computer to replace one I've had for a while that I've been using as my 'research computer'.  This is where I have all of my working data, along with all my software to do the data reduction and analysis.  The new computer arrived and within the first week the ethernet adapter (on the motherboard) got zapped by a lightening strike.  So there was no way to have a wired ethernet connection.  Ok, so I switch to wifi with a little USB ethernet dongle.  I got the computer set up and configured, and installed all the python stuff so I could start my switch from IRAF to the various astronomical python packages that are now available.

One day the system asked if I wanted to upgrade the OS.  I figured this was a good time to do that, so I went ahead with that.  After the upgrade, no matter what I did I couldn't get the wifi to work!  So now I have a pretty decent machine but no reasonable way to get data in and out of it!

I found another computer that had windows 7 on it.  I decided to replace the hard drive with the one from my new computer.  This went well for a couple days until THIS computer decided that it didn't want to power up anymore.  It just sat there and clicked!

Needless to say, I was pretty bummed out.  So I put all these computers away and sort of forgot about them.  Thinking about this new research and still wanting a newer computer to do the work, I started thinking about either getting yet another new computer, or figuring out how to cobble together something with the pieces I have.

I also had acquired a new wifi USB dongle.

This past weekend I pulled everything out.  I put the original new machine back together (less one memory stick which I can't find, so I only have 2 GB of memory at the moment), plugged in the new wifi adapter and VOILA the machine came up and connected to my wifi!  So yay now I have a working machine with some decent processing power.  I'd like to get at least 8 GB of memory on this machine.

Obs-Session Data

Here's some stuff from recent obs-sessions.

First, here's a light curve from the eclipsing binary star HW Viriginis:

The position of HW Vir in the sky seems to be a place where a lot of satellites move.  Here's an example of a single 3s image:

Here's a combined RGB image of open cluster Messier 46, with planetary nebula 2348 in the background.  The color information of the stars and nebula will hopefully tell me a little bit about their situation:

A long exposure (about 450, 3 second images) of the Eskimo Nebula (planetary nebula, NGC 2392):

Here's the same image as above, but stretched to show the faintest stars:

Here's a long exposure (about 450, 3 second images) of the Globular Cluster Messier 5:

Here's a video showing the motion of asteroid (6) Hebe:

... and asteroid (433) Eros:

Observing asteroid (6) Hebe

From about 03:30 - 05:30 UTC on 19 April 2019, I collected some reflected photons from the main-belt asteroid (6) Hebe.

At the time of the observation, (6) Hebe is in the constellation of Gemini.  The approximate RA and DEC was: 06h 55m 24.3s +19d 38m 20s.

I took 700, 4 second exposures.  Even during the observation, I noted that I probably should have done 3 second exposures.  When I decided on 4s exposures, the tracking was looking really nice.  Maximizing the exposure time improves the signal-to-noise, so being able to do 4s exposures would be better than 3s exposures.  The problem is that the tracking quality kept changing, so much so that many of the star images were short streaks.

So because of the pretty poor tracking, my first run at stacking and making some photometric measurements on the two reference stars in the field-of-view used 544 images.  So that means I've lost 156 images, or 22.3%.  That's a bit much, so I'll need to go back into the data to see if I can modify the parameters in the code to pull out a few more images.

Here's a single image:

Here is the stack of all 544 images (inverted greyscale):

Here's a movie showing the motion of (6) Hebe:

https://youtu.be/HA3sQQUsDLU

There are some strange things in this dataset that I need to look at carefully.  More on this later...

Eclipsing Binary Star HW Virginis

On 23 March 2019, I observed the eclipsing binary star HW Virginis.  Here is a preliminary light curve of the event:



The x-axis is the Julian date, and the y-axis is the relative magnitude compared to a reference star in the same field of view.

Here's a long exposure of the field of view:

Deepest Image Sofar

This image is a stack of 954, 3 second exposures of the XZ Canis Minoris region.  I'm pretty easily seeing 17th magnitude stars, and maybe some hints of 18th.