Jupiter in Average seeing

[Paul Haese]

Last night the seeing was average at best but mostly it was bad. When it did get good I thought it might improve so I waited it out but unfortunately it was only average for a short time then degraded back to fast seeing.

Image here (http://paulhaese.net/29Aug20101503UT.html)

Not sure how long this aweful season will last for, but the moisture density seems to be the real problem. Last year good seeing was hard to come by and this year any reasonable seeing is almost impossible to find. I put this down to the drought being broken in this state. 2008 was a very dry year for us here but the seeing was very good on quite a few nights. Since the drought has broken the seeing has steadily got worse in the winter months for each year. Next year I am heading to Broome with Anthony. I suspect that it will be wetter again next year here and so the seeing will be at best wretched.

[icytailmark]

good result there paul

[Quark]

I feel your pain Paul, this year has certainly not presented the opportunities of the last few years.

Reckon a gauge of this is when we start looking forward to the nights of even ordinary seeing, just to have the satisfaction of getting some data to play with.

Even though the seeing for this image of yours was crook you still have captured the two white ovals in the NEB that are currently involved in some most interesting gymnastics as they become entwined. They are the white oval just in a little from the the Eastern limb on the Northern edge of the NEB.

Well done
Regards
Trevor

[michaellxv]

I was out last night too for only the second time this month. Looking out the window now the clouds are returning :(

It's amazing what you can get in poor conditions.

[jjjnettie]

Even in the best of seeing my Jup images aren't a patch on this.
Lovely Paul!

[Paul Haese]

Thanks all for the kind words.

Trevor, I have a theory about this seeing business that might work for the rural community. Here we go: Seeing can predict drought conditions for rural communities.

Like I mentioned above in my previous post I can go back to 2004 and 2005 and see how the seeing got better as the drought progressed. I have some records and I have my images. My last two seasons have produced fairly average images of Jupiter. I did not get bad at imaging in that period of time, something else changed. The seeing died away. In 2004 the seeing was fairly average for the whole season. Yields were to my understanding not bad at that time, rainfall was on average. (Lester might be able to help here with figures) 2005 was pretty similar and then in 2006 the rainfall started to drop away, culminating in 2008 with extremely dry seasons across this part of the continent. The quality of my images correspondingly peaked during the same year. If the humidity and moisture level is very high the seeing seems to degrade over the entire winter months when seeing is supposed to be at its best. This must mean that seeing can be used as a tool for farmers to determine what sort of season they are going to encounter. DIMs setup in rural areas that report back the star scintillation on each night will quickly show data on the seeing. Combine that with humidity data and I reckon there is a tool to see if drought is heading our way. The by product for all this is a seeing monitor systems that helps us imagers. Perhaps I ought to present this to the weather bureau and see what they think? Perhaps I am just nuts??:lol:

[bird]

Thanks Paul, the jetstream has been a real horror this year. As I mentioned on the phone, Leisa' flight from Perth to Sydney last night was delayed 45 minutes because the jetstream was so strong that her flight would have arrived in Sydney before the overnight curfew was lifted...

For the last few months the lower half of Australia has been swamped by it. We can only hope that the pattern will change over time, but I don't think it will change very quickly.

cheers, Bird

[Matt Wastell]

Hi Paul - I still marvel at your imaging! Thanks for taking the time to share your work!

[Quark]

Hey Paul, reckon you could be onto something with this theory. I can see that in the future, agricultural communities will contact wandering bands of itinerate planetary astronomers to setup and attempt to image in their areas and if they produce good images then the farmers would either move on or become irrate and maybe stone the astronomers.:rofl: