Temperature variation in Cyprus

Many are thinking that the weather in Cyprus is always nice and hot. The reality is that it varies through the year.

This is picture taken 3 months ago in Troodos (end of February), on of the mountains of Cyprus. Everything was covered with snow and the temperature was around 0. Also for small periods of time the temperature inside the capital city of Cyprus can go -1 or -2.

Troodos snow Cyprus.

And then, the spring came. We got a heat wave from Africa and the result was 32*C during the day inside the city of Nicosia. This picture was taken mid April. As we entering to the summer, we expect even higher temperature, up to 40*C.

Temperature near Nicosia.

Summer here we come! Can't wait the time to visit the beautiful beaches again!

A beach near Larnaka. Notice the clean waters, the picture was take without any polarized filter.

Processing Milky Way in RawTherapee

This text is an analysis of a video I did some months ago how to process photos of our Milky Way in RawTherapee. You can find the picture here . The photo was taken by wiegemalt. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Editing: Step 1: Fixing lighting The first thing someone notices when opening the picture is the extreme noise due to high ISO used (1600 - check the picture on the right). The first thought is to de-noise the picture, however, if you do that you are going to loose the details of the night sky. The main reason for the high noise is the additional exposure Rawtherapee adds when the 'Auto' button is pressed. In particular, the RT adds +2.4 EV to equalize the picture. This is Wrong! What we want is to keep the noise down and at the same time bring the stars up. That's why we are going to play with the Tone Curve of the RT. To adjust the light properly we increase the cont...

RTL-SDR Blog V3 Arrived

I recently bought a new RTL dongle that supports Direct Sampling that allows frequencies less than 40Mhz. In particular, the model I ordered was the RTL-SDR BLOG V.3. DONGLE that was really cheap compared with other solution. It still can't reach the quality of the other more expensive receivers, but it still a step up. The Dongle comes with a long external antenna. The RTL dongle. So, the question now is how better is from my old SDR. I did a check with the RTL power tool to see what is the difference. My old SDR Dongle (Fitipower FC0013) has coverage from 22 to 1100 MHz. The new Dongle RTL Blog V3 a has Rafael Micro R820T has coverage from 24 - 1766 MHz, but it also contains Direct Sampling that allows for High Frequencies. A word of warning here, the reception using Direct Sampling is very bad, especially if you connect the antenna without a filter band or/and preamplifier. I did experiments using the rtl_power, and the results showed much more gain for the ne...

Processing a High Dynamic Range raw image with RawTherapee

Editing High contrast images is hard because you have at the same time to decrease the highlights, increase the dark areas, and at the same time keep the natual colours. Although not always possible, shooting RAW always helps. The RawTherapee offers a plethora of tools to "fix" your images. To illustrate the tools available in RawTherapee, we will edit a picture taken by Ivan Sagalaev and released under CC license in the Play Raw competition of the pixls.us forum here . Image after importing to RawTherapee. Step 1: Preparation. First we fix the distortion (if exists) in the Transform tab. Before start editing we always try to fix possible distortions of the image. Initial Histogram of the picture. Step 2: Editing the light. The second step is to press the "Auto Levels" button in the Exposure tab. This will light the dark places of the picture, but it is not enough.The sky now is it much lighter than before and the colors washed out. Exposu...

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