2005-12-08

If you can't beat it — enjoy it

Anyone into amateur astronomy will know what a pain the weather can be at times. It's not that weather is a "bad" thing, it's not that you can't actually enjoy watching or experiencing the weather, it's just that when you want to be out observing it's annoying when conditions don't allow it.

One option is to shake your fist at the overcast sky and go and find something else to do (build your own astronomy website, for example), another option is to actually take an active interest in the weather.

Today, I'm taking the first step towards the second option — with a geeky twist of course. I've just taken delivery of a WS3600 personal weather station. Once I've figured out how it all works, found good locations in my garden for the instruments, figured out how to interface with it from one of my computers (I'm hoping I'll be able to ignore the Windows-based software that comes with it and do something with one of my GNU/Linux boxes) and got it all up and running don't be surprised if a new section appears on one of my web sites with lots of pointless weather-related data.

File Under: Weather, Personal Weather Station, Meteorology, Geek Toys.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That weather station stuff looks very nice. I hadn't realized they were getting so inexpensive. Just might have to look for something similar here in the states.

Dave Pearson said...

From what I've seem they're even more affordable in the US.

All being well, once I've got it up and running (which might take a bit of time — I'll need to do some work to get it set up in a useful place in my garden), I hope to be able to contribute to wunderground.com.

By the looks of this map I'll be filling in a nice little gap.

Anonymous said...

Dave, nice blog,

cheers
Mitch