Quote:
Originally Posted by 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??  |
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.
