It’s -13 outside. I was trying to make snow; I poured boiling water in a mister and was spraying it around outside. I think the droplets were too small; what came out looked like white steam and rose quickly out of sight. Bigger droplets were definitely frozen.. Anyway it was inconclusive. I checked the WoodMaster, … Read more
After being down for maintenance since Sept 17, GOES 13 is back in service. Which is good because my AppleScript more or less broke while it was down. “The trouble stemmed from a motor vibration, which caused a lubricant buildup that obstructed the spinning motion of the filter wheel in the sounder. A team of … Read more
I use an AppleScript to scrape files from the GOES archives at http://goes.gsfc.nasa.gov/goeseast/fulldisk/ir4/ The collected files are then processed a bit in Photoshop, named with sequence numbers and fed to QuickTime Player 7 as an image sequence to make a QuickTime movie. Today, the script broke, and upon investigation, I found that the GOES 13 … Read more
Using an AppleScript, the individual images were collected from NOAA’s archive site, and made into a movie with QuickTime Player 7. The coverage is from 8/05/2012 to 09/05/2012, showing the development of Hurricane Isaac. The images are from the IR (infra-red) band of the GOES, which permits 24 hour coverage.
A light rain is falling, hopefully ahead of the much-needed downpour they’re getting to the west. All Summer I’ve been eyeballing the radar and hoping the storm trajectory intersects our farm. We’ll see a nice red blob pass just to the south, they get an inch, we get nothing
The normally great skies at Rancho Hidalgo were somewhat marred by aerial haze from fires burning in Arizona. Here’s a picture from the El Paso- Phoenix plane showing the source of some of the aerial haze. We’re at about 36,000 feet. I showed this to Dan Klinglesmith, who is studying astronomical seeing at the … Read more