Cassiopeia Observatory

Smoke Gets In Your (Venusian) Eyes,
Weather Station Data
Posted: 1 June 2012

Thursday, 31 May 2012, smoke from the Whitewater-Baldy Complex Fire in New Mexico was visible in the sky here in southern Arizona. The sky almost looked overcast at times! This photo is from my Live Webcam during the afternoon:

Due to the smokey sky, I decided to not open the observatory. However, I did take some photos at sunset, which occurred at 1926 MST. This photo, taken 4 minutes before sunset, shows smoke in the otherwise clear sky:

Here's the setting sun:

And the smokey sky just after the sun set:

Venus was first seen with the naked eye at 1944 MST just above a band of smoke. Venus is just below center in this photo, with the inset showing a magnified Venus as photographed with the D7000 DSLR, 300mm focal length lens:

The forecast is for the smoke to clear out of our sky during the day on Friday, 1 June.

After some false starts due to incorrect software documentation and some response delays from LaCrosse Technology, my Cassiopeia Observatory Weather Station is now reporting weather data online. BUT I'm not using the LaCrosse supplied weather data "publishing" program. The Windows software looked like an unfinished Windows copycat attempt of MacDraw from 1984, and it would not upload the weather data to my web server, although it should have. So, I ended up writing an Automator workflow that captures the main Windows weather program screen on a Macintosh computer, crops the image to be just the weather data, and then uploads it to my web server. It uploads new weather data every 5 minutes. The resulting weather data display is way better than what the LaCrosse "publishing" program could do. You can see current weather data for Cassiopeia Observatory on my Live Webcam web page.

Comments are welcome; use the Comments section below, or you can Email Me. Thanks.

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