From Tim PARKER
@. . .
. . Rick et al:
I'll get my latest Coolpix images
processed today and mail them off to you.
I don't think they show any flashes, though there are a couple of
suspicious hints in a few images,
but they're better for the most part than the image that Don and I processed and
ftp'd to the Marswatch site on Tuesday.
Last night, I imaged Mars with my Jaegers
6" f/10 and Starlight X press HX516. Seeing started out very good, 7/10, at
around 10:30pm PDT, but the marine layer started rolling in shortly after that
and though it didn't cloud over until 2:00am, the seeing never got better than
about a 3/10 during the entire time.
I didn't see anything obvious in the way of flashes, but I'm not sure I
would have given those conditions.
I acquired about 600 images, and will look at them in more detail this
evening. Will try again tonight if
it's clear.
For those with webcams: I experimented a bit with my Home
connect PC web cam last night, both using it's own software and using Dave
Durant's plugin for MaximDL, and found that the web cam did nearly as well as
the HX516 when I set it to acquire 8-bit grayscale images rather than
color. Part of this may be due to
the poor seeing, as the HX5 really excels when the seeing is good. Download times were very fast for
comparable size frames (I used 320x240).
I was able to download at least 2 images per second, whereas the HX516
still took about 3 seconds to acquire and download a 150x150 pixel frame. All this should change once I order one
of the USB adapters, though!
planetarily,-Tim.
p.s. my pacific net address hasn't been
active for some years. My current
home email address is:
(8 June
2001 email)
Tim
PARKER (NASA, USA)