From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: June 12, 2012 10:59:05 AM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Re: a gift of watermelon pickle

Hi Alan;

On 12-Jun-12, at 10:40 AM, Alan Friedman wrote:

Many thanks for your comments, guys.

Milton, the seeing looks very good through the clouds. I find this to be the case with light cloud cover, though I'm not sure if it is real, of it is the obscuring of the data that makes it appear so.

Seeing was very good that day - as the NAM Forecast 300 millibar map predictor suggested. It was also good on the other days when I was testing my rig out on Sunspots - but I can't mosaic them together due the the filter issues I mentioned previously. We have a very large dammed lake about 150 meters away and I think that helps stabilize the local seeing conditions, as I usually have good seeing here.

Cloud cover was erratic to say the least.  At some points you could see the suns disk through the clouds naked eye, then other times almost no clouds at all. Astro IIDC was adjusting the exposure time from 33 ms down to 0.1 ms on the fly to balance the exposure times out.

How do you go about cropping the dimensions of the movie? I've wanted to do that recently but couldn't figure out how.

You can't. You have to re-compress the entire movie and crop out the portions you don't want. I wrote a tool for this 10+ years ago, which is quirky to use and it's PowerPC only. I may consider re-working the code and adding it to Astro IIDC, if there is any interest. I likely will be adding Movie to FITS.., (for people doing processing in different packages),  Chunk Movie.. (creates  a series of reference movies at specified intervals from a single movie) and a couple of other features too.

Here is a mosaic of two very different exposures showing a sliver of atmosphere during a similar moment of the transit from California. My seeing was much worse than yours at this point:

http://www.avertedimagination.com/images/ingress1.jpg

Very nice. I haven't tried pushing any processing to see if I picked up the atmosphere yet.

PS:The NAM Forecast 300 MB predictor maps for North America is available here:

http://weather.unisys.com/nam/300.php

TTYL..

Milton Aupperle