All Sky Photometer for NearSys Station, 31 August 2017

All sky photometer data was collected starting at 6:00 AM. Below is a chart of the collected data. The spikes seem in the red data are not as strong as last week. I will probably rotate the Photometer to see if the pattern persists.

Sunspot Report for NearSys Station, 31 August 2017

Tiday's sunspot image shows three large sunspots.

A calculation of the size of the largest sunspot determines it's umbra is 13,856 miles in diameter and it's pemumbra is 30,483 miles in diameter.

Compare this to Earth with a diameter of 7918 miles.

Visibility for NearSys Station, 31August 2017

Based on UAVSonde images, the visibility is estimated to to be 15 miles.

Looking East

Looking North

Looking West. The sun's light shows just how bad the smoke is.

Looking South. Again the sun's light makes it abundantly clear how lots of smoke fills the valley.

Sky Temperature at NearSys Station, 31 August 2017

The smoke lifted yesterday, but has returned today. Otherwise, there are no clouds.

Slightly smoky overhead.

The thermal imager detects a temperature of -22 *F. Tharmr's one degree Celsius warmer than last week.

The temperature towards the North appears to be warmer than towards the south.

I'm interested in making these measurements again once the smoke has left the valley,

UAVSonde Data for NearSys Station, 31 August 2017

UAVSonde were collected at 4:30 PM. Here are the data.

Altitude: 2,339 feet
Temperature: 93 *F
Relative Humidity: 7%
Pressure: 918.4 mb

Altitude: 2,804 feet
Temperature: 93 *F
Relative Humidity: NA
Pressure: 918.4 mb

Sky Temperature at NearSys Station, 27 August 2017

Smoke from forest fires has poured back into the Treasure Valley. This got me to wondering if this will change the temperature of the sky above me. It can certainly change the appearance of the sky. Then I got to wondering if cloud height might be determined by monitoring the temperature of the ground and the sky.

So for the next several weeks, I'll photograph the sky (and any clouds and their height) and get a thermal image. This should be done at the same time, I would think. However, the sun's position changes from day to day. So perhaps this measurement should be done when the sun is at the same elevation.

Here's my first attempt to gather this data. Let's see where it goes.

Blue skies overhead and not a cloud in the sky.

The temperature overhead was -21 degrees. That's the temperature at an altitude of 22,500 feet. Is this a significant measurement? Only time will tell.

Sunspot Report for NearSys Station, 26 August 2017

I am going to investigate making weekly sunspot counts using a Sunspotter telescope and a cell phone camera. I want to find a procedure using Fiji image analyzing software to increase contrast of the image and count the number of sunspots.

Here's the first image. Unfortunately I haven't been able to design a procedure to detect and count sunspots yet. I expect the procedure will involve thresholding the solar image.

At least the image has been enhanced. Next is to sharpen it and then threshold it to isolate sunspots. Fiji the could count them more consistently than I can. Note, there's one sunspot group near the middle of the disk.