Wesley's Tool-Box

After several days of clear skies, clouds have been rolling in for the past two days. Amazingly, they did thin out for a few hours in the evening, enabling me to see the ISS for two consecutive days under good conditions. Tracked observation on April 11 failed due to low battery on the telescope, but I was better prepared on April 12 and made a successful tracking.

The International Space Station was 546km away from me at the closest approach at 19:38:03 (408km altitude, -3.6 mag brightness), so the second photo from the bottom right is representative of this. It is coincidentally the clearest photo I got. You can identify many of the modules - starting from the Zvezda module on the top and moving down, you can see the Zarya module in the center with two radiator panels side by side. On the bottom, you can see the cluster of Columbus-Harmony-Kibo modules in the center, with large solar panels on each end. The bright spot is likely where the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft from the CRS-14 mission is currently docked at.


As I have captured several hundreds of frames, it was sufficient enough to arrange them into this 34-second video clip. I have hosted the file on the website, and it should be watchable on a modern browser.

Telescope: Celestron NexStar 6SE + X-Cel LX 9mm eyepiece
Device: iPhone X (afocal)
Settings: 28mm - ISO 400 - 1/1500s - f/1.8
Filters: None
Date/Time: 2018-04-12 19:37-19:38 KST
Location: Naju, Korea
Photos processed with PIPP 2.5.6 and RegiStax 6.1.0.8

It's been about two years since I did astrophotography with my Celestron telescope. When I finally took it out of storage to take the photos of ISS recently, I noticed that the shots weren't as clear as I expected. The same problem came up as I tried to take photos of the Orion Nebula yesterday, and I realized that the collimation of the telescope was significantly off. After about an hour of fiddling, the problem was fixed and I was able to see the bands of Jupiter and the Cassini Division on Saturn again. It looks like I'm good to go for the next few months of observation, including the closest approach of Mars on July 31. Here are the photos of the two planets in the order of original (from 4K 60fps recording), stacked, and wavelet processed results. Resolution was roughly 0.32"/pixel due to the iPhone X having slightly wider lens than iPhone 6S Plus.



Telescope: Celestron NexStar 6SE + X-Cel LX 9mm eyepiece
Device: iPhone X (afocal)
Settings: 28mm - ISO 50 (Jupiter) / 250 (Saturn) - 1/60s - f/1.8
Filters: None
Date/Time: 2018-04-08 05:18 (Jupiter) / 05:30 (Saturn) KST
Location: Naju, Korea
100 (Jupiter) / 46 (Saturn) photos stacked with PIPP 2.5.6 and RegiStax 6.1.0.8

Tiangong-1, the first Chinese space station, is set to fall back to Earth around April 2. Its orbit had been slowly decaying since its service was ended in 2016. I found out that it would be visible for one last time in the sky this morning, so me and my daughter Celine decided to witness its streak. I set up my iPhone X on a tripod and placed it on the window facing north. Then I launched NightCap Camera app in satellite capturing mode.

Shortly after 5:30AM, Tiangong-1 made its bright (-0.6 magnitude, 181km altitude) appearance from the west, streaking towards east and quickly dimming. Just as it disappeared from our eyesight, another bright flash appeared to the east of Polaris and then quickly disappeared. From my experience I knew that was an Iridium flare. CalSky website verified it to be Iridium 80, showing up at 5:30:36AM with a magnitude of -2.0. We were very lucky to see the two together - since the space station will disappear in a couple of days it was truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

On the photo, you can see, starting from the top left and looking towards bottom right, the Tiangong-1, Polaris, Iridium 80, and the Cassiopeia constellation. Click on the image to see it in full size.

Device: iPhone X
Settings: 28mm - ISO 2112 - 61s - f/1.8
Filters: None
Date/Time: 2018-03-31 05:30:01 KST
Location: Naju, Korea

Power Silicon Ltd., a Korean manufacturer of LED lighting and power supplies, has expanded its portfolio to smart lighting late last year under its "PSAurora" brand. In order to promote these new products, the company was looking for people to test out and review these smart light bulbs. The smart lighting market is becoming crowded these days, so I was curious to know if they could hold their own and put in my request.

After the request to review was accepted, two bulbs arrived in the mail - the globe bulb version of the Smart Bulb and a handy Smart Portable. Both were controllable by Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) from a smartphone using a companion app.


Each bulb came in a cardboard box adorned with English product description and basic user instructions. A much more detailed single-sheet user manual in both English and Korean was in the boxes. The bulbs themselves were largely made of plastic, but they did not feel flimsy and were well rounded.

At a first glance, everything seemed to be there for a user to get everything up and running, including installation of the app and controlling of the bulb. However, I did find some room for improvement upon deeper inspection.