Whorls

On my last observing run, we winded and clouded out. However, looking at the infrared water vapour pages at NOAA, I saw a beautiful line of vortices spinning out between two fronts of air.


NOAA keep all the imagery public for 30 days, so use a script to pull the images over and stitch them together with mplayer to produce an animated GIF.


# grab all the data for this night with the whorls in them
for i in q -w 0 23 do wget http://www.goes-arch.noaa.gov/WCWV08145${i}00.GIF;done
for i in q -w 0 23 do wget http://www.goes-arch.noaa.gov/WCWV08145${i}30.GIF;done
for i in *.GIF; do c=`echo $i | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`; mv $i $c; done

for f in *gif ; do convert -quality 100 $f `basename $f gif`jpg; done

mencoder "mf://wcwv*.jpg" -mf fps=10 -o test.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vbitrate=800