Finally a clear sky, but windy and cold

Nice crystal clear blue sky, but with a high temp of 42f and rather breezy, had to set up out of the wind so only had a couple hours between the trees to broadcast on NSN.

Cold, thin clouds and breezy

Not the best weather today, but I had a day off and had to take advantage of it.  Continuous thin clouds didn't make it easy to get a good image, plus trees in the way now that the sun doesn't get so high in the sky anymore.  I shot 1200 frames instead of the usual 500 just to be sure I could get enough useable frames to stack and reduce the noise somewhat, when I knew it'd be bad with the thin clouds mucking things up for me.

Almost forgot what to do.....

Been a while since I got the scope out, been working full time again and too tired to setup after work, so had to wait for a clear sunny day on a weekend.  Too bad it wasn't clear today, but clearer than I've had in the last couple months, still had to shoot through thin clouds and really variable seeing, but got a decent image out of the effort, along with a nice broadcast on nightskiesnetwork.com with visits by Norm, Hal, and the Last Ecvarian, aka Jim, plus numerous lurkers and guests, so it was a fun afternoon. All pics are from the single full disc capture, the zoomed shots are just cropped from the original high resolution image.

A few spots again

Solar activity has been quite low, and so has my imaging time, got busy building grain bins with the farmers always waiting til the last minute.  Its been cold cloudy and windy lately too so difficult to get a decent image today and it came out kinda noise with only 50 useable frames to stack due to crummy seeing and strong winds.

Hot as heck again

Thank god for long handcontroller cables and long usb extensions.  Computer was in the house with the scope on the front porch, spent a lot of time waiting for a clear patch of sky to catch a decent avi capture while broadcasting on NSN.

Clear, cool and still crummy seeing.....

72F and calm, but the seeing was still rather bad, and the transparency still wasn't as good as the forecast was predicting so a rather noisy image again.

Lunar 8-23-2013

The first is a single frame from the NSN broadcast when the moon was still only around 15 degrees up.  The processed image was around 25 degrees up, a bit of altitude can make a big difference besides stacking and sharpening.