About the Automatic Display/Download

When the Auto-Display page is active (check the Status line) the Mitros display currently being generated is displayed on your monitor. The actual refresh interval is found in the Refresh line. If the first display you see does not exhibit a channel trace, that's because you opened the page just as a new record was beginning. By clicking your browser's refresh button you can obtain an instant update current at time of the most recent upload and independent of the download interval encoded on the Web page.

 If the page fails to load, wait until the next automatic refresh or click the browser's refresh button. There are many "Internet" reasons (such as server load) why a page or image might rarely fail loading. If the display looks late, click "Refresh".

The top part of the Mitros chart contains important time information. Start and End are the scheduled beginning and ending times of the current project. A project comprises one or more records each being of length indicated by the time axis at the bottom of the chart. The starting time of the current record is displayed in the Record Start box at the top of the chart.

On occasion the ending time of the current project may seem in the unrealistically distant future. That happens when the system has been set to run for an indefinite period of time. It will be stopped manually.

If the Status line indicates some condition other than Active it should be assumed the display is not being updated, regardless of the refresh interval posted.

Interpretation of Display: The blue channel represents forward scattered power from meteor ionization of the upper atmosphere. Most individual meteors appear as isolated vertical lines at this scale, rising above the background scatter. Other indications may be present. During summer months local thunderstorms will appear as increasingly dense gatherings of spikes typically having a symmetrical, near Gaussian distribution of occurrence. These are most liable to appear in the late afternoon. Electrical equipment noise (food processors, etc.) generated at the same location as the observatory give rise to dense clusters with instant onset and demise but lasting for a short time.

The red channel, if present, represents the signal strength of WWV (Boulder Colorado) at 15 MHz unless otherwise identified.

This display is currently experimental and subject to intermittent availability.

Back to Automatic Display  or use your browser's "back" arrow.