Howdy from under the clouds of Texas!

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Ethan Chappel avatar
Hello everyone! 

I like to consider planetary imaging as my primary form of imaging, but now that I think about it, it's in the shadow of deep sky imaging.  While we (me & my father) image planets every about 85% of the times it's clear, deep sky imaging is guaranteed every clear night and takes a lot more effort.

Of course, imaging is not possible when the sky is cloudy, which has been almost everyday in the past year. This is reflected very nicely in my plots. Once the sky does clear, the sky is usually turbulent, hence the few & blurry Jupiter images of the past two months.

Outside of astrophotography, I like to program in Python. Right now I'm expanding on Michael A. Phillip's script that transfers files from one folder to another folder automatically. My additions have made the code many times longer, but it's still an atom sized code-base compared to AstroBin.
Tony Cook avatar
Hello Ethan.

I always imagined that Texas had nice clear skies. Lets hope it clears for you soon.

Its been cloudy far more than say 10 years ago where I live going on my log books. Is the world just getting cloudier as the years go on I wonder?
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Ethan Chappel avatar
Hi Tony!

The skies have been very bad since last November. The month of May was an especially bad month of record setting rain. Severe storms with watches and warnings were a daily occurrence. We have thankfully moved on from that but the clouds still persist. A few days later in the week are forecast to be clear, but seeing is suppose to be dismal once again.

I will say though, most of the time leading up to last November was just as you imagined it, very clear and very steady. Often got images with detail I would've expected from a telescope larger than the Celestron C8 I was using at the time.
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rhedden avatar
I live in Lubbock, TX, and I have to agree that the weather has been terrible for imaging lately.  I didn't get out once between Nov. 6 and Jan. 29, and when I finally got out with a new camera, we had gusty wind and 5-arcsecond seeing.  As soon as it warms up, the wind will start to howl; once that stops, the endless afternoon thunderstorms and summertime cirrus clouds will arrive.  The last two summers have been useless for imaging until the end of July.  Oh well, that's what New Mexico's mountains are there for…
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