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Exceptionally the Met Office forecast was for dusk till dawn clear nights for 3/4 and 4/5 May. In the early hours of Saturday it looked good at first glance but wasn’t. This morning at 03:30 BST there was again a good sprinkle of stars but there was no sign of the Milky Way through Cygnus. The ISS appeared on a -4th mag pass. I followed it all the way through the zenith and away to the east. With a binocular I could see it highlighting an otherwise unseen veil of clag along its whole track.
My diary shows in 2024 I’ve had the mirror covers off just six times, March 3rd being the most recent. In only three of those sessions were conditions adequate enough to produce an acceptable image. Yes, I confess I skipped some sub-zero evenings in January. As the years pile on the attraction of a hard frost wears thin. I’ve recorded rain on 2 days in every 3 so far in 2024.
It’s demoralising. My enthusiasm for astronomy is ebbing away.Alan,
I guess as a purely visual observer, I get to use more nights than you do as an imager – but this year has certainly been a disappointment so far.
My weather records for 2024 show that I’ve observed with my 51cm on 28 nights this year (including last night-this morning), with only three of those nights being dusk-dawn. The rest have been clearings and holes. This time last year (May 5) the number was 39 with 11 dusk-dawn nights.
If the weather eroded my enthusiasm for astronomy, then I would have given up a long time ago. It’s hard being an amateur astronomer in this country, and it always has been. So no change there! For me the biggest threat to my enthusiasm is the brightness of the backgound sky, which has deteriorated greatly over the past few years. OK, I live in north Birmingham, and the skies have never been dark, but the introduction of LED lighting has pretty much killed off my fainter then mag 16 detections, whilst the the majority of the time sees me struggling to get to 15.5. As an observer of many faint CV’s, this is the demoralising aspect for me. I won’t give up though. Over the past few years I’ve slowly been altering my observing programme to compensate for the degrading sky quality.
If it comes to a choice between cloudy weather and sky quality, I’ll take the former every time!
I hope your skies start to improve.
Gary
Hi Gary,
Do you take SQM meter readings of your home sky? I’d be interested to know what you think is an average and good night from your location.
I consider my sky to be pretty bad living in a SE Essex city location next to a regional airport. Generally, I get a SQM reading of about 19.0 on a reasonable night at about 3am, the darkest part of the night. I really good night can be SQM 19.3. I have moved my main instrument out to Spain to do most of my comet observations, but before it went out there I could still image mag 18.5 comets even through my bright sky.Hi Peter,
I don’t have a dedicated meter, but I do have an iPhone app called Dark Sky Meter. Not sure how accurate it is, but the odd time I do take a reading, the results are between 18.8 and 19.2. I take them fairly infrequently, because to be honest I get depressed when I see the result.
I was hoping that one of the good things to come out of the Birmingham City Council debacle would be the dimming of street lights after midnight. It’s been rumoured that it might happen, but knowing the incompetence of all involved, they are probably still looking for the switch! I’m still waiting for that to happen.
Gary
It is rather depressing and I can’t recall it being this bad before- I had no clear nights at all in December 2023, and just a few nights in January to April. May so far has been a little better.
Like Gary, I am a visual observer so that don’t need pristine clear skies for observing. My interest hasn’t waned of course, but I have noticed just how poor the Met office is at predicting clear nights. I now use a combination of sources including satellite 24 to make my own forecasts, the official forecasts are simply to inaccurate.
Cheers,
-PaulFour usable, or part usable nights here, in the last 2 weeks (all night last night) – I know because 2 weeks ago was when a Windows 11 update totalled the network between my house and the dome. Not that I am counting the clear nights since, you realise.
I’m expecting several more clear nights before I manage to mend the network…
I have to do it myself as while Microsoft have admitted some people had probs with a recent update, they are not planning a quick fix. Unfortunately, my full knowledge of networking fits on the back of a stamp – written using a crayon. Its not a fun learning curve.
For 2024, I had a below average number of clear nights for January. For February, March and April the results have been about average. However, for partially cloudy nights, February and March were below average. It feels like there have been more cloudy nights recently though, with last year being very poor. I missed the peak of the Perseids due to cloud, which was pretty annoying! My records show that last year I had the lowest number of clear nights and the highest number of totally cloudy nights since I started noting my sky conditions back in 2018. The average being 96 clear nights per year from North Yorkshire. In 2023 this was only 78. Hopefully this year will be better.
Alan,
Thanks for posting this. I don’t feel the usual ‘outlier’ that I normally do when the ‘How was it for you’ posts appear. My observing opportunities have been about average, I guess my ‘average’ = rest of UK ‘dire’. Since the start of the year I’ve had 14 sessions long enough to collect polarimetry data for 7 targets including T CrB plus another 9 short ‘image for fun’ opportunities. Hope conditions improve for you (and don’t get any worse for me!).john s
Generally poor observing conditions in NW Leeds since last autumn. I don’t expect much improvement until the weather systems stabilise. Visual observing can take advantage of breaks in the cloud cover but occultation timings require good conditions at a specific time window, hence very few successes this year. Variable star photometry and meteor cameras are hindered by variable sky transparency, RMS waits for 20 field stars whilst UFO Capture detects meteors under almost any conditions; still poor coverage of the major meteor showers.
The local council has replaced all streetlights with flat panel luminaires, but many residents are installing very bright (in)security ‘photon torpedoes’ to floodlight the sky, their brickwork, gardens and their neighbours’ property. They should be banned.
I’ve come to the conclusion that when the BBC or Met Office say “clear” they mean driving conditions for motorists, not sky clarity for astronomers. For those who don’t have £zillion weather forecasting supercomputers we rely on low budget solutions such as in the attachment. I also use Sat24 GB every evening to check the movement of the cloud formations.
Alex.
Attachments:
I have a weather Owl. It’s been mentioned on this forum before, so I won’t post a photo of it again. It remains more successful than the BBC/Met office forecasts.
Gary
Peter – that pic must have been taken on one of those rare rainy days at Ribblehead… 🙂
Gary – perhaps the Council would consider making the Weather Owl available via the BAA Shop… 🙂
Alex.
Alex,
You raise an interesting point about what the Met office and BBC Weather class as a clear night. At the time of writing, both of them say it is clear outside (a single moon with no clouds on their websites) and yet at the moment it is at least 85% cloud cover- if only someone from these institutions could go outside and look up to check!
It would be interesting to know their definition of a clear night sky! Satellite 24 indicates a gap coming- we wait and see…
Cheers,
-PaulHello all, My comet astrometry records for the first half of this year 2024 Jan to May show that I was able to observe comets and report astrometry and photometry on 34 nights from Tarbatness in Highland Scotland at Lat 58d N. This is better than 2023 for the same period when I observed on 25 nights.All night twilight will now prevent me from comet imaging between mid May to mid August.
Denis Buczynski MPC Code I81All, many thanks for the tea and sympathy, and I don’t feel quite so despondent hearing the shared experiences.
Paul A – I’ve come independently to the same conclusion – the Met Office has become useless at forecasting a clear night. It wasn’t that way not that long ago. I have decided when they say clear, they mean the cloud is thin enough to be be able to make out the phase of the Moon. I will try out some of the other sources, Satellite 24 etc. Thank you for the pointers.
I suspect there is particular geographic problem at work here. With more moisture in the air the Straits of Dover seem to hang on to cloud more than they did, and the prevailing SE winds drag it on to the land.
Alex P – love the term ‘photon torpedo’ applied to domestic lighting. My next door neighbour to the SW is half a mile away but the lights on his daughter’s horse paddock illuminate my lounge! Thankfully they aren’t used too often, and earlier, not later. Everything you say matches my experience here. I’ve tried asking for lights to be adjusted etc but no-one gives a damn. And of course the extra moisture in the air exascerbates the stray light.
Cheers, Alan.
Alan
Dreadful weather here in Warrington for most of the year so far, so you are definitely not alone. I have compensated by making more use of robotic telescopes, specifically the COAST (COmpletely Autonomous Survey Telescope) at the Observatorio del Teide, Tenerife. At least this has enabled me to keep making observations,
even though my own instruments are gathering dust and cobwebs.I would like to relocate to Arizona, but I don’t think the family would appreciate it. So I await better weather with a stiff upper lip!
Don’t let the clouds grind you down.
Alan
My next door neighbour to the SW is half a mile away but the lights on his daughter’s horse paddock illuminate my lounge! Thankfully they aren’t used too often, and earlier, not later. Everything you say matches my experience here. I’ve tried asking for lights to be adjusted etc but no-one gives a …
Cheers, Alan.
Alan S – Many neighbours are unaware that their external lighting is a nuisance. Having a pleasant chat with them can sometimes resolve the problem. The other year a neighbour a little distance away from me installed a light that would have been visible from the next county. It brightly illuminated my house, part of the garden and observatory. I reported it to the local council as ‘light trespass’, an official came out to assess the problem and asked the resident to adjust their lighting. They still have an external light, although it’s not as blazing as before. Not an ideal solution, but I didn’t want to aggravate any dispute, and it’s now partly masked by bushes and trees.
Note to report any issues as ‘light trespass’, not as ‘light pollution’, ‘loss of night sky’ and never mention ‘astronomy’. Unfortunately, in some circles amateur astronomers are viewed as ‘nutters’ and this can work against you. My jaundiced opinion, but born out of years combatting light pollution!
Cheers!
Alex.
Weather here in Brisbane Australia has been fairly cloudy for much of 2023 and more so this year. My lunar occultation results reflect this. I forwarded the wonderful image of the weather forecasting stone to a friend who came back with a picture taken on 6th April this year of a similar stone in a park in Tenterfield, New South Wales (Australia). A couple of small differences – jumping = earthquake and gone = cyclone – after all we are in the southern hemisphere -and cyclone is the equivalent of hurricane, tornados being relatively unknown. Are these stones multiplying?
Peter A.Attachments:
Lets be honest. Some people don’t do nice chats.
I had a nearby neighbour with 500W halogens on the back of their house. Eventually I had to try the light nuisance route with the local council. I got a letter suggesting I buy thicker curtains…
Hello
I am not too surprised by what you say about the frequency of cloudiness in the sky, I have always known that in the UK clouds and rain are frequent and inclement. However, even here in Italy some worsening variation seems to be happening, skies more often cloudy and above all less and less transparent. I am neither a visual observer nor do I take photographs, but for several years I have been observing, with a camera, the colours of the sky at sunset and sunrise. Well, for about a year now, the number of clear evenings (i.e. followed by clear nights) seems to have decreased; from an average of 6-8 clear nights per month, we seem to have fallen to 2-3.
Another thing I have noticed is the decreasing consistency of the snow in the Gran Sasso chain. Until a few years ago, one climbed the highest snow-covered peaks (over 2500 m altitude) with a boot and crampons, sinking a maximum of 10 cm. For a few years now, people have been sinking down to their knees and beyond, and the avalanches (and unfortunately also the victims) have increased. It’s the effect of climate change, agreed. But I can’t help but wonder if this is the only cause or if there is an external cause.
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