From: "Milton Aupperle" <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: October 17, 2007 3:03:43 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: First Mars of 2007

Hi Folks;

Here is my first Mars shots of 2007:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Astro_IIDC/files/Planetary/Mars20071014and15_MJA.jpg

Nothing spectacular as Mars is only 10.7 arc seconds high, but a few

features (North Polar Hood, Hellas Basin, Syrtis Major etc.) are visible.

The NAM Unisys 300 millibar forecast map site :

http://weather.unisys.com/nam/init/nam_300_init.html

seems to be fairly accurate at predicting turbulence levels. October

14th I was in an area between light blue to pale blueish pink and on

the 15th I was in the bluish pink to pale pink. The seeing was

definitely better on the 15th. My next window of potentially good

seeing will be on October 19th at 0600 UTC :

http://weather.unisys.com/nam/42h/nam_300_42h.html

and people in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, North eastern Manitoba and the

Dakotas should have good seeing.

On a related note, if any of you are looking for archival strategies

for Mars with those multi gigabyte files we record, have a look at

dual layer DVD R+ disks. Future Shop had a sale on Memorex DVD+R DL up

to 8x speed disks and I bought 75 disks (enough for 592.5 gigabytes of

storage) at a cost of $0.96 CDN per disk. That works out to $0.12 per

gigabyte of storage and each disk can hold 7.9 gigabytes of data. I

replaced the old DVD burner in my G5 with a Sony model and it takes 20

minutes to burn 7.9 gigabytes of data. Most of the Intel Macs can burn

or read DVD+R disks too.

I would avoid DVD-R DL disk, as my experience with them (especially

RIData brand) has been bad (60% failure to burn or had disk errors),

except if you buy the $5 per disk Verbatim disks.

HTH..

Milton Aupperle