From: Alan Friedman <alan@greatarrow.com>

Date: October 14, 2005 10:24:09 AM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Mars

Nice presentation, Milton - congratulations on your good conditions.

I glimpsed Mars between the parting clouds last night for the first time in a week.

Alan

On Oct 13, 2005, at 4:50 PM, Milton Aupperle wrote:

Hi Folks;

I had the best seeing yet in 2005 on October 12. The Jets stream slid

north and parked overtop of Edmonton for a change and at 10 pm I had

10/10 skies for turbulence. Out of focus difraction rings on Altair

were perfectly still with zero motion - something I might see once a

year if I'm lucky.

But by the time Mars was above 30 degrees, turbulence was about 7 to

8 out of 10 and a thin high cloud / haze had made it's presence known.

But still this was a lot better than normal, so I shot 15.4 gigabytes

of Mars videos over the next 4 hours. By about 3 am, the cloud

thickened and I had to boost gain to compensate for image brightness

loss and by 3:45 it was pretty much pointless to do anymore.

Sequence of best frames with feature notation are shown in the file

"Mars_20051012_MJA.png" with in the Planetary folder.

Clear Steady skies..

Milton Aupperle