From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: October 18, 2010 2:06:56 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Help with solar mosaic

Hi Jim;

Same seeing here too in Calgary.

Last night I had a high frequency shimmer which made even achieving focus at 2,000 mm FL a "challenge" on the Moon, even at 3 ms exposures. I didn't even bother taking a single image of Luna or Jupiter after 3 hours of sporadic monitoring.

I have tried imaging Jupiter and the moon over the last week (well except friday when it dumped  50 mm of wet snow on us and had white out blizzard conditions - CSK said it was "clear skies" then) and didn't even bother recording anything. The CSC and NAM forecasts have been out to lunch for everything (i.e. clear sky predictions == completely clouded over or not, perfect seeing in the Dark Blue / Pink forecast == stars jumping +/- 20 arc seconds between frames or not). The models they use are still based off the old weather patterns that have been "stable" since at least 1950's. but this abnormal (geologically speaking) period of stability is gone. In fact this past 100 years has been abnormally wet and cooler compared to the past 5,000 years of "normal" climate history for Western Canada, if you listen to real geologists, geographers and climatologists and not Politicians / Hollywood / Pseudo Science types that is.

TTYL..

Milton Aupperle

On 18-Oct-10, at 10:41 AM, jimchung2338 wrote:

Seeing around Toronto has been pretty miserable of late, there were two nice Jupiter transits last week but the results were so poor that I didn't even bother processing the data, just deleted it right off the drive.

Saturday day was just as poor but I tried some solar imaging and even worse, attempted a solar mosaic because I had never tried it before.

The lack of stable surface features makes lining up the mosaic images very difficult and it got worse as I started building the solar structure up.  I ended up deleting the top 2/3rds but I'm still left with the uneven illumination of the various frames.  I don't know if its possible to process them out in PS.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4852049/sunmosaic2small.jpg

Jim