Viewing conditions last night

[Commanderfish]

Did anyone have really crappy views last night?  The sky was supposedly clear and the seeing steadiness wasn't bad as I got my first hints of detail from Mars in my 127 Apo, but the transparency (if that's the right term) seemed to be very poor.  I couldn't even locate M81 and M82, and I view them every session!  There seemed to be a lot of soupy stuff up there.  I'm guessing it was either a lot of hazy humidity after the first properly hot day in some time - or maybe very light cloud rolling in.

 

I'm based in Surrey by the way.

[Marky1973]

It was pants in Gloucestershire last night when I had a quick play around 11pm. Wider views were nice, but anything more than 70x Mag was swimming in soup! So it wasn't just you! :-)

[kev100]

Hiya,

I didn't bother last night, but Friday was very similar to what you describe. Very hazy and humid, and any attempt at finding a faint fuzzy was a waste of time. Planets, though, were excellent! I got surface shading on Mars, banding and a clear Cassini division on Saturn, and a pretty clear GRS on Jupiter ... Star clusters and doubles were okay, and I picked up the ring, dumbbell and veil nebs, but they offered little in the way of detail.

Kev

[Stu]

I had some lovely views of the Planets from down in Devon on Friday night, but similar to you I just could not get any satisfaction from DSOs. M13 and M57 looked rubbish and I couldn't really find anything else worth looking at. Although the sky appeared clear, it must have been very poor transparency cause by high haze or similar.

Jupiter looked fabulous though, and Mars showed its darker regions aswell as the ice caps. Nice. Just shows that seeing conditions and transparency are very different things, and you normally get one without the other, rarely both together.

[Commanderfish]

Yep I really struggled with DSOs last night, M13 looked pretty poor despite being at the zenith.  This lack of DSOs was very dissapointing as I was trying to evaluate my new scope - the Starwave 152 achro, which is supposed to be a richfield/DSO demon.  It did show promise around the Cygnus starfields but everything looked crap to be honest. Except, as you pointed out, for planets.

I got my first detailed view of Mars ever, using the ES 127Apo.  At x202 and x272 I could see three darker regions of mars, and hints of the northern polar cap.

What's interesting was that the 152 Achro also detected these areas, and whilst the views were not as sharp as the Apo, there was no CA - unless the image was defocussed, and then there was a faint violet/red halo.  But that really doesn't matter as I can't think when I'd be viewing defocussed on purpose, other than to test collimation.

[ronl]

After such a perfect day and really good forecasts for the night it was like looking through milk, even 

after 1.30 am, I kept saying to myself is bound to get better, but it didn't.

[laudropb]

Same here in the West of Scotland. Transparency was very poor.

[John]

Transparency was awful here last night but the views of double stars, Jupiter, Mars and then Saturn were pretty good until the haze thickened into cloud and I lost the southern side of the sky completely.

I was getting good details on the above planets at 225x and 257x with my 100mm and 120mm refractors and split doubles including the tricky Zeta Herculis.

DSO's ? - no chance !

 

[Commanderfish]

Is it odd that the entire UK had poor transparency?  Or is this because we all had a nice hot day after rain at the beginning of the week?

[CraigT82]

Was the same here last night (Bridgwater), I'm away with work and travelling with my 130p and 127 mak.  Had a look at m13 in the 130p and it just looked like a smudge on the lens... terrible.  Not a single star within the cluster resolved.

I couldn't get my head around it at first, where I am there should be a lovely dark sky but I was really struggling to eyeball stars.  In fact could barely see the keystone so it took me a good while to locate m13!

 Jupiter was lovely in the mak though.  Saturn hidden by trees unfortunately.

Looks like it's going to be similar conditions tonight so I'm setting the mak out to aclimatise.

[John]

A few years back, when we had a long dry spell during the Summer months, everybody kept telling me how lucky us astronomers were but the reality was that there were very few nights which were not dominiated by hazy conditions. Not much use for the deep sky observers even when darkness had finally arrived.

I guess we were asking for trouble taking up a hobby that is so dependant on particular weather conditions, in the UK

[Commanderfish]

I'm trying to work out whether it's worth getting scopes out tonight.  BBC weather indicates low humidity (48% at 10pm) climbing as the night goes on (62% at midnight), but I suspect that humidity is only part of this transparency problem? 

[Pondus]

At 59.2 N we just have a few minutes of nautical twilight now. It doesnt even pretend to get dark this time of year.

About 1.5 mag sky. No chance of spotting Polaris, no Ursa Major.

Seeing was pretty good. Jupiter looked nice at 150x.

I must say that Mars, naked eye, looks quite beautiful against the blue sky. Really lovely.

And even far from good views of the red planet through the eyepiece, I finally managed to observe some dark features.

With the planet just 9 degrees over my horison I got a better view than expected.

 

Rune

[Stu]

2 hours ago, Commanderfish said:

I'm trying to work out whether it's worth getting scopes out tonight.  BBC weather indicates low humidity (48% at 10pm) climbing as the night goes on (62% at midnight), but I suspect that humidity is only part of this transparency problem? 

Satellite suggests that it will be more of the same, lots of high haze around

[Wardr77]

I'm based near maidstone in kent and the seeing was very poor last night, Vega was a fuzzy blob as were other stars I tried to view, strangely I could easily see the Milky Way spanning across Cygnus. Defocussing the brighter stars showed what I can only describe as an effect like horizontal rain streaming across the star image, I can only assume this must be wind blown haze or some such thing, never seen it before. Views through the 80mm travel scope were pretty nice though.

Big scope is currently outside cooling, but not sure it's going to be much better tonight

[Davey-T]

1 hour ago, Wardr77 said:

I'm based near maidstone in kent and the seeing was very poor last night, Vega was a fuzzy blob as were other stars I tried to view, strangely I could easily see the Milky Way spanning across Cygnus. Defocussing the brighter stars showed what I can only describe as an effect like horizontal rain streaming across the star image, I can only assume this must be wind blown haze or some such thing, never seen it before. Views through the 80mm travel scope were pretty nice though.

Big scope is currently outside cooling, but not sure it's going to be much better tonight

Not far from you and last night was rubbish, saw the ISS go over and it went rapidly down hill from there, the sky not the ISS

Gradually turned into an autumn fog.

Just about to do the same again  ie; watch the ISS go over and look at the sky

Dave

[Wardr77]

Same again tonight! Like you I saw the ISS, just had another look with the big scope but no good at all. Just brought it all in! At least I managed to see some of Wonders of the Universe on  BBC4 (again)

[cotterless45]

Fuzzy here, got up at 2 to see the glorious sight of Cygnus overhead. Just counted a few stars,

Nick.

[Thewalkingastronomer]

The seeing around portsmouth was actually pretty good last night. When I got back from work at 11:30 I set up my 80mm apo with binoviewer and had some excellent views of Mars and Saturn at about 100x. Saw surface shading and a polar cap on Mars along with a clear cassini division which I was happy with given their low altitude and the small scope I was using.

[chiltonstar]

Hazy here - good, but not that good for Saturn and Mars, and the seeing deteriorated every now and then with waves of "swimming pool" effect. Higher up, the seeing was excellent so I hopped around a few of Cygnus's double stars including Delta Cyg which was well split last night, although I've seen it better.

Chris

[Commanderfish]

Last night was better transparency wise, but still relatively poor.  Seeing was really quite good for those objects visible through the mediocre transparency.  The planets put on a good show again but a few DSOs also put in an appearance.

Jupiter was very clear with steady seeing allowing a sharp image at x160 in the 5" Apo and x181 in the C9.25 which I briefly mounted next to it; there was quite a lot of detail in the SEB and NEB including what looked like a big storm/eddu in the NEB.

Mars took a lot of magnification, looking sharp at x202 in the Apo and very similar in the c9.25 at x181.  Nothern polar cap was hinted at as a lighter area, whilst the three dark areas (East, South and West) were readlly apparent).

In the 5" Apo at x161 Saturn showed a clear Cassini division, a band in the middle of  the planet (is this a shadow or a cloud band?) and looked unusually 3-D, particularly at the top where the rings pass behind it.  I'd swapped the c9.25 for the 6" achro at this point, the achro was surprinsingly good with no CA on Mars or Saturn, but not as sharp as the 5" Apo using similar magnification (x150).

Below and West of Saturn, Antares popped above the trees and showed it's lovely red colour, but M4 to the west was not detectable.

I saw M13 and resolved some stars in both the 5" Apo and the 6" Achro, though the transparency actually deteriorated as I was viewing it.  

I managed to find M81 in the 5" Apo, the 6" Achro showed both M81 and M82 with direct vision, which then made M82 possible in the 5" with averted vision.

Caught some nice clusters around Sadr and Deneb (Cygnus) including the Cooling Tower and Hole in a Cluster.  These were surprisingly clear.  The Cooling Tower looked like a children's joint the dots puzzle and yet was somewhat 3D in appearance.  The 6" showed a brighter image on these than the 5" Apo; more stars jumped out in the 6" although for the most part they were still visible in the  5" Apo, just not quite as bright.

Albireo's (Delta Cygni?) lovely gold and blue stars showed clearly at x45 in both scopes.  Above it, Glob M56 was apparent at x45 but it was hard to resolve any stars.  It was a lot easier to find in the 6" than the 5" Apo.

Had a quick look for the Veil and North America Nebula using a DGM NPB filter, all I could detect was one long strand of cloud-like material but I'm not sure if this was actually nebula.  I do wonder whether a 2" Oiii filter will be useful in the 6" Achro, has anyone tried a similar combination?

The Double Cluster was low, sitting North North East, right above the glow of London from my location, but both scopes picked up 15-20 stars in each cluster, so around 30-40 in total - not amazing but something of an achievement given that the sky background in that area appeared light orange.  

So a lot better than Sunday night but not really transparent enough to allow the 6" to flex it's optics.

[Stu]

Nice report Dinesh. I looked out last night and it appeared pretty hazy so you did well!

Albireo is actually Beta 1 & 2 Cygni, Delta Cygni is a much tighter, harder double but well worth a look, 2.7" separation and a much dimmer secondary.

A 2" OIII should work well in the 6" I would say. Worth it for the Veil and NAN, you won't get them all in view at once, but each element of the Veil should be frame well. If you centre 52 Cygni then the Witches Broom runs right past it so it's easy to find, so long as the sky is dark enough obviously, no filter can get round that problem!!

[alan potts]

Can't talk about England but here it was annoying. I put the scope out as it looked as if it would clear but it didn't, the forecst was talking of getting worse. Put the scope away and looked out at 11.30 just before bed and it was a clear as a bell, sadly I was too tired to take advantage.

[Mark S W]

Not a lot better over here I was working on some PN in Delphinus but it was of no avail.

Went over to M27 and it was not as clear as normal. I blame it on the Tropical Storm

early this week in the Gulf of Mexico even through I am 1200 miles away.

 

[BGazing]

I've learned to trust the combination of FLO's ClearOutside and Meteoblue astro forecast.

For my location, the former gave me orange in the temperature column, the later orange to red in the jet winds section.

Went out outside to grab an hour or so before the Moon gets up. SQM-L reading of 20.54, wahey, or so I thought, much better than the 19.90 regular spot near Belgrade. 

Planets were a no go, dancing blazing little things that were out of focus at anything more than 60x and in focus were jolly peanuts. Could not split Epsilon Lyrae. M27 and M57 looked rubbish. Globular clusters, including M13...meh. M11 held itself the best but still meh. M8 barely through UHC.

And the worst is this june soupy sky which, even when relatively dark, is actually kinda grey through the scope. UK skies are not exclusive to this, trust me.