Happy New year Jeremy, and to all BAA members reading this.
A far better year than 2017 – which wasn’t too difficult to achieve.
(2016 in brackets)
North Birmingham.
Clear nights (less than 50% cloud) 44 (25), Partially clear nights (50% or more cloud) 69 (61)
Total observable nights 113 (86) with 55 of these nights being under Moonlight conditions. I made variable star observations on 108 of these 113 nights. This is my best year for clear nights since 2003.
Total hours at the telescope: 237.3 (183.6)
Best month May (March) 6 clear and 12 partially clear
Worst month March (February) 2 clear and 2 partially clear
On 53 nights of the year, Birmingham Met Office gave the wrong prediction for cloud cover. This is a six night improvement on 2017. My weather owl did much better!
My total visual VS observations for 2018 is 9,013 – the best year since 2009. It was a poor year for remote CCD observations though with only 1,767 observations obtained. This was due to the Open University COAST telescope being out of commission for most of the year, and a prolonged Monsoon in the SW USA which affected the AAVSOnet SRO-50 reflector in Arizona. All CCD observations were of variable stars – of course.
2018 was memorable for me as I passed my 300,000th visual VS observation in October.
Gary