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It has become something of a New Year tradition to comment on the Forum on the past observing year. As it’s cloudy here tonight, I thought I’d kick this off.
I find that I observed on 99 nights, or 27% of all nights in the year. My best months January and March, each with 19 nights.
I have been collecting these stats since 2005 and 2022 was below my average of 110 nights per year (30.5%). The attached plot shows the data over the 18 years. One reason my totals are a bit lower this year is that I have been away, for work and pleasure, much more than usual, making up for lost time over the pandemic (though it might have helped to boost my observations in Jan and Feb as I was still subject to a travel ban)
Note: I only record the nights that I actually observed and expressed as a percentage of all nights in the year (although some nights might have been clear, but I was away from home or otherwise indisposed). A successful “night” might only allow one CCD image to be recorded – or it might be clear all night. So the observing trends do not necessarily correlate to weather trends.
I made 5007 individual variable stars observations (plus quite a few time series, which are not included in this stat), submitted 2969 meteor trajectories to the NEMETODE database and 22 Hα obs to the Solar Section (must do better on the latter count!)
I wish everyone a Happy New Year and clear skies in 2023!
Jeremy
Attachments:
Observing statistics for 2022.
Gary Poyner (Birmingham)
A record year – the most observing nights from my location in Kingstanding, Birmingham since I began to record weather data in 1978. Admittedley most of the observing opportunities were with broken cloud, or mere breaks in cloud, but a record is a record.
The year seems evenly split for clear skies before and after the Solstice. Clear skies from dusk to dawn were rare with just 14 during the year, but slightly better than 2021 which recorded 11. Most of these were in the shorter Summer months.
2022 (2021 in parentheses)
Clear nights (less than 50% cloud) 41 (19)
Partially clear nights (50% or more cloud) 103 (100)
Totally cloudy nights 221.
Total observable nights 144 (119) with 74 (82) of these nights having Moonlight interference. I made observations
on 139 nights.Total hours at the telescope 303.67h (227.7h)
Best month August with 17 nights, 9 clear and 8 partially clear (April – 16)
Worst month November with 8 partially clear nights and 0 clear (December -3)Birmingham Met office gave incorrect information on cloud cover for 77 nights during 2022 (73). They remain consistantly dire.
Total visual VS observations for 2022 is 12,005 (8,201), an increase of 3,804 on 2022. CCD single measures using remote telescopes COAST, SLOOH and the AAVSO SRO-50 and MPO-61 are 2,996 (3,527), a decrease of 531 on 2021 – mainly due to a long Monsoon in the SW of the USA and prolongued down-time with COAST.
Attachments:
Observing statistics for 2022
According to my records 2022 was another poor year here in South Oxfordshire. I record the number of nights on which I was able to make at least one photometry observation as a percentage of the number of nights when I was at home and potentially able to observe if weather permitted. I think this is a fair estimate of the percentage of observable nights in the year.
In 2022 that was 102 nights out of 282 = 35.8% (2021 35.5%). The best months were March and August, the worst September and December. Plots of these percentages by month for 2022 and annual percentages from 2005 to 2022 are attached.
During 2022 I made 311 photometry runs on specific targets comprising 17002 measured images. This included several multi-hour runs observing flare stars. I also recorded 130 spectroscopy runs with 2932 spectra measured.
Hello all,
My observing stats for 2022 were that I was able to observe and submit comet astrometry to MPC and the BAA Comet Section on 90 nights(I don’t count the number of comets observed but some nights up to twenty individual comets are recorded). This does not include the months of May, June and July when all sky twilight does not permit observing at this (58dN) latitude.The Summer months here were cool and cloudy and the Summer heat wave that was experienced in more southerly latitudes did not extend into the Highlands of Scotland. Whilst the high pressure dominated the south there was a ribbon of cloud diverted around the high that persisted over Highland Scotland.I have yet to look at my automatic metoer camera output to get the number of detected meteors. An automatic Aurora/NLC video camera was installed here in September by Nick James, this gave excellent detection of aurora alerting me to obtain more detailed aurora images.
Denis BuczynskiHello,
I observed on 29 days of 2022. By far my best month was December, followed by October then January. Comets were my main target, but I did also take pictures of assorted transients, globulars and other DSOs.
A poor year. But interestingly(?) I did observe on both the first and last days of 2022!
David
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