Pre-Observing Report

For the night of Thursday May 28: More clouds overhead. Ominous as they may look we are not supposed to get any rain... yay! Once again I feel that it will end up being like the past couple nights where the first couple hours are a loss and then the last 7 hours of the night will be decent. This also means I will more than likely be up doing dome flats past the early morning twilight. It won't be too bad today considering this is my last night so I will have to be up in the morning anyway so that I can catch my flight back to New Hampshire at 12:45p. Looks like it will be a long 24 hours... not slated to get back until 11p EST. So as I sit here with my bowl of soup for dinner/breakfast, I am crossing my fingers hoping for some decent seeing this night!

Pre-Observing Report

For the night of Wednesday May 27, 2009: we are looking at cloudy skies for the first few hours, until around 11p according to cleardarksky.com. After the initial cloud cover, it is supposed to open up for the rest of the night for clear observing with good seeing. The winds look to be light, as they have been this whole trip, around 10mph, on average. It would seem that tonight will be much like last night in that the first part of the night will be spent waiting for the cloud cover to vanish, topped off with data that will be of good quality, but not the excellent quality that we are striving for.

Pre-Observing Report: Update

As fate would have a large group of dark clouds have been approaching rapidly from the East. They have just appeared on the radar and will apparently last until 11pm. Dome opening has obviously been delayed for a few hours.

Pre-Observing Report

The weather predictions look good for tonight. Once again, mostly clear skies with light and variable winds under 10mph for the first half of the night and then under 5mph for the duration. Seeing is forecast to be good, not excellent, but good, indicating seeing around 1.2"-1.5" for the night. Odds are that I will be able to get excellent photometry for all of my objects, save one. That lone star is polluted by the light reflected by Saturn. The level of pollution two nights ago was tolerable, but not so last night and I can imagine this night will be even worse. Although this would seem to be an issue, I have photometry on HIP 54639 from my run in February and thus it is not a total detriment. So, lift your mug with a choice beverage (mine is coffee!) and here's to clear skies!