From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: January 17, 2011 2:15:14 PM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Saturn Storm, a week later

Hi Jim;

At least you captured something :)

It has been a really awful fall / winter so far observing. I haven't had a really clear dark night since November 1st and the maybe 5 clear night had bad turbulence too.

I was at the lake for 3 weeks over Christmas time at a Mag 6 dark site and we had two clear nights and one hazy one.

The hazy / thin cloudy one was good enough to get the mount drift polar aligned, after I shoveled 2+ feet of snow from the the space I wanted to set up on in the garden.

The first clear night was on New Years Eve, but I had dinner reservations made with Friends / Family so I couldn't' get away. It likely would not have been very good anyhow as it was -32°C (-40°C with wind chill) that night and from previous experience, the tangle of frozen wires on the mount from heaters, cables, power cords and stiff mount generally cause poor tracking. But it was a dark clear night.

The second night was a bit hazy and corresponded with 70+ kmph gusty winds from a chinook. Even with 6 meter conifers and a fence on the north west side where the wind was howling from ( and the tube observing roughly parallel the wind), the stars was jumping +/- 8 arc seconds trying to capture NGC 206 in M31. When I switched to M81, the tube was perpendicular to the wind and was jumping +/- 50 arc seconds from wind gusts, so I packed it in. After processing NGC206,  I got nothing good enough to even bother sharing.

TTYL..

Milton Aupperle

On 17-Jan-11, at 1:54 PM, jimchung2338 wrote:

Funny how its clear on Monday mornings only.  It was a real -20C at about 6 AM and Saturn was at its highest in the sky but the storm front was not due to be visible until 7:30.  Still I was hoping to catch the start of its appearance.

Seeing was truly wretched, far worse than a week ago.

On top of that, my Flea has died.  I've been using my big Scorpion ROI'd to image this one.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4852049/SaturnJan17.tif

A warning, a really terrible image.

Jim