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Vacations August or September?


N3ptune

August or September?  

6 members have voted

  1. 1. Which choice should I pick?

    • Vacation choice #1: August the 4 to August the 26
      2
    • Vacation choice #2: September 1 to September 23
      4


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I need a boost to help me pick the right vacation date, so far am having a very hard time selecting the perfect 3 weeks because both choices are good. My goal is to have the less moon has possible for DSO observation that's the priority, 3 weeks in a row 2 good DSO weeks and 1 moon week.

What do you think ? 

CHOICE #1 - AUGUST 4th to AUGUST 26th - ARGUMENTS

Temperature: Over 15 Celsius most of the nights and fairly hot during the day around 25 Celsius (and more)

Humidity: Usually High (not comfortable and bad transparency)

Clouds: Medium (I would say)

Mosquitoes: High amount. (not comfortable)

Insect body armor required: Yes (Not comfortable)

Summer time: Yes, I still can enjoy summer time to do summer things.

cHeJULQ.png?1

CHOICE #2 - SEPTEMBER 1st to SEPTEMBER 23rd - ARGUMENTS

Temperature: Around 15 Celsius and bellow most of the nights (Very comfortable for me)

Humidity: Most likely, less then August.

Clouds: Most likely higher then August. (Sept, Oct, Nov, Dec are usually the worst for clouds)

Mosquitoes: Low to none (A major comfort argument)

Insect body armor required: No  (A major comfort argument)

Summer time: It's over.

xwhVjch.png?1

September seems like a better choice to me but it will be a long summer without vacations, and I am afraid of the autumn clouds. It's 50 / 50.. Aghhh

What would you do ?

thank you very much in advance for the help.

 

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8 minutes ago, Mak the Night said:

It's a difficult one, I'd be inclined to go for August though. You're probably going to get less clouds and as you're on vacation/holiday you can pull more 'all-nighters' and it will be warmer.

It may be toss a coin time Neb! lol 

Hello @Mak the Night Tossing a coin, could be the solution...

I don't know yet if September will be accepted by the management. I need to have to have a discussion with them tomorrow, it's not impossible but it could be refused in september.

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17 minutes ago, N3ptune said:

Hello @Mak the Night Tossing a coin, could be the solution...

I don't know yet if September will be accepted by the management. I need to have to have a discussion with them tomorrow, it's not impossible but it could be refused in september.

Well, whichever month you decide on, I hope you get some great observing in.

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@Mak the Night

Thanks for the wishes. You see, 1 hour ago I was all about September, now it's all about August, Ill decide tomorrow, with a few days left to decide. In 2 weeks of no moon, if I can go to a dark spot 2 or 3 times, my vacation will be a huge success. Not much then that is required for me. 

During my last 1 week vacation from Febuary, I drove 2 times to the dark spot and I had memorable observations. Incredible.

The last week of the 3,with the moon, is also interesting for moon sketching, I always enjoy to sketch craters and mountain. So it's 2 weeks of mysterious DSOs at the mysterious spot and 1 week for the moon at home. I always wait to go to a dark spot for the DSO.

DSO observation it's the most important thing for me.. it's my favorite astro-drug.It's the most rewarding thing by a bit. (Although the planets are quite rewarding too, I remember 2016 opposition of mars.. wow)

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14 minutes ago, N3ptune said:

@Mak the Night

Thanks for the wishes. You see, 1 hour ago I was all about September, now it's all about August, Ill decide tomorrow, with a few days left to decide. In 2 weeks of no moon, if I can go to a dark spot 2 or 3 times, my vacation will be a huge success. Not much then that is required for me. 

During my last 1 week vacation from Febuary, I drove 2 times to the dark spot and I had memorable observations. Incredible.

The last week of the 3,with the moon, is also interesting for moon sketching, I always enjoy to sketch craters and mountain. So it's 2 weeks of mysterious DSOs at the mysterious spot and 1 week for the moon at home. I always wait to go to a dark spot for the DSO.

DSO observation it's the most important thing for me.. it's my favorite astro-drug.It's the most rewarding thing by a bit. (Although the planets are quite rewarding too, I remember 2016 opposition of mars.. wow)

You're welcome. We can have nice Septembers here, but if I was planning an astro vacation I think I'd go for August. 

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I've been planning some ST80 sessions for in a couple of weeks or so. Mostly low power binocular target DSO's and the like.

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@geoflewis

Yes I am interested in Perseids of course, thanks for the info about the peak, i was not aware Aug 12th was the peak.
no problem for the moon calander. I can't find the website now from this computer but it's a good website.

@Mak the Night

August ok. It's a good idea to plan observations, I am not spending enough time on planification in order to find the very
faint and hidden stuff. You do it in advance, this is cleaver. Need to do that too.

@Stu
September is very tempting because of the no mosquitoes.. ,yes, that is a major point for me too.

I should talk with the manager soon today to see if September is available for me to start with and after that, I'll have almost
2 weeks to decide (has I saw this morning from an E-mail) good news.

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You can never have enough planification, especially with deep sky IMO. As the weather here's a bit pants I thought I'd put all the software and star atlases I have to good use.

Deep Sky is freeware on Android/Chrome OS. It's simple and practical. Its charts are from Sky & Telescope Magazine.

5aa6b47738ffd_Screenshot2018-03-12at17_08_17.thumb.png.b156cf355be63213ff6641f148bcf800.png

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8 hours ago, Mak the Night said:

You can never have enough planification, especially with deep sky IMO.

 

That's good advice for me @Mak the Night. And I remember, each time I was well prepared with a list of objects to find, (some hard, some easy), those where the greatest observations. Especially when I could find faint NGC objects.. (non Messier) they are obviously much harder to locate and very rewarding even if less impressive, it's the skill of spotting something hard to spot, with no electronic technology to help me.

When I find a new NGC, most of the time this was the result of genuine work.

I could be out-of-date... but I like that. 

Frankly, I might never use "deep sky" at home.. because it requires Chromes OS...  But I still have Stellarium and my precious paper atlas, the Double Star Atlas Second Edition..  Do you prefer Deep Sky over Stellarium ?

===============

Oh and I CAN take my vacation in September. So I really have 2 choices available..  (; what shall I do?

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1 hour ago, N3ptune said:

That's good advice for me @Mak the Night. And I remember, each time I was well prepared with a list of objects to find, (some hard, some easy), those where the greatest observations. Especially when I could find faint NGC objects.. (non Messier) they are obviously much harder to locate and very rewarding even if less impressive, it's the skill of spotting something hard to spot, with no electronic technology to help me.

When I find a new NGC, most of the time this was the result of genuine work.

I could be out-of-date... but I like that. 

Frankly, I might never use "deep sky" at home.. because it requires Chromes OS...  But I still have Stellarium and my precious paper atlas, the Double Star Atlas Second Edition..  Do you prefer Deep Sky over Stellarium ?

===============

Oh and I CAN take my vacation in September. So I really have 2 choices available..  (; what shall I do?

I try to do the homework by memorising the positions of target objects by using atlases, planispheres or software before a session. That way when I'm out looking for deep sky objects, usually with a refractor, I don't have to shag about with maps and/or any other paraphernalia. 

You can run Deep Sky on Android, so it will run on an Android phone. I only run Borkarium, sorry, Stellarium on Ubuntu. I haven't run it on Windows for several years (I still have a Win 7 custom built desktop). I don't know if they have fixed the BIOS clock bug or not. I think Bugarium suffers from feature creep nowadays. The Android version is a fork and reputedly buggy. It isn't freeware and I don't want to pay for something that could crash a lot, especially a fork. It does run well on Ubuntu though with minimal borking. It took me a while to convince Cartes du Ciel to run on Ubuntu but it does really well on it. 

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Although SkySafari is now my favourite, with CdC a close second. Dunno about the vacation. The first week in September can be really nice in the UK, but it can also rain the whole month. I'd go for August if it was me. 

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Mars should be nicely placed around midnight early August.

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I'm all filtered up for Mars.

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The Baader Semi-Apo is supposedly superb on Mars.

IMG_20180201_105853.jpg.c852b1818495773ebef508502a383e61.jpg

I found that during the last Mars opposition an #11 Yellow-Green revealed as much as a Baader Neodymium.

IMG_20180221_120734.jpg.f4fdbeded2ed8357cadfb305729f7d67.jpg

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5 hours ago, Mak the Night said:

The first week in September can be really nice in the UK, but it can also rain the whole month. I'd go for August if it was me. 

That may be the case for you, but N3ptune lives in Canada given the midges experienced in August, September sounds like it would be much more pleasant. I'm sure he knows his local climate well too.

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@N3ptune

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Hey Neb, I forgot to ask, do you use KStars on Mint? It’s in the Ubuntu repo.

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There’s even a stripped down Android version. I believe it can be compiled for Windows. It seems mainly  used on Linux. The ‘droid version is glitchy but it’s OK for freeware. The repo version seems fine although it might not be the latest release. It’s developed by KDE and I’m pretty sure runs on anything Debian/Ubuntu based. It's good for planning sessions but can also control a GOTO apparently.

kstars.thumb.png.9f0bd838b0f935c2f9939047ee53a945.png

https://edu.kde.org/kstars/

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Blurb ~

KStars is free, open source, cross-platform Astronomy Software. It provides an accurate graphical simulation of the night sky, from any location on Earth, at any date and time. The display includes up to 100 million stars, 13,000 deep-sky objects,all 8 planets, the Sun and Moon, and thousands of comets, asteroids, supernovae, and satellites. For students and teachers, it supports adjustable simulation speeds in order to view phenomena that happen over long timescales, the KStars Astrocalculator to predict conjunctions, and many common astronomical calculations.

For the amateur astronomer, it provides an observation planner, a sky calendar tool, and an FOV editor to calculate field of view of equipment and display them. Find out interesting objects in the "What's up Tonight" tool, plot altitude vs. time graphs for any object, print high-quality sky charts, and gain access to lots of information and resources to help you explore the universe! Included with KStars is Ekos astrophotography suite, a complete astrophotography solution that can control all INDI devices including numerous telescopes, CCDs, DSLRs, focusers, filters, and a lot more. Ekos supports highly accurate tracking using online and offline astrometry solver, autofocus and autoguiding capabilities, and capture of single or multiple images using the powerful built in sequence manager. ~ op cit

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The Android version doesn't run on Chrome OS (yet anyway). Mind you, on 'droid it's buggier than Stellarium lol.

The desktop version is quite customisable but I haven’t explored it enough even though I must have been running it for four years. I went a bit mad and ordered the #82A Lumicon as well. The #82A and the #11 along with the six Baader colours, a single Baader polarising filter and an ND seem the most useful.

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The #82A shown above is TS Optics/GSO. Baader just don't have an equivalent to the #11 and #82A. These are invaluable for Saturn (#11) and the Moon and a twilight Jupiter (#82A) IMO. How are your own filter trials going?

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I doubt I’ll replace all my other TS Optics (GSO) filters with Lumicons though. 

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@mak the night I installed Kstars, Ill check it out a bit later, it's installed. I like the "what's up tonight" feature, that's a great add on.

Nice for your new filter 82A Lumicon.

I still need to try my new color filters, the #11 on Saturn and Jupiter, It's a lifetime experiment and I to have many interesting colors to try. We have very bad weather for almost 2 weeks now.. it,s terrible outside right now.  Eventually they all will be tested these GSO filters...

 

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1 hour ago, N3ptune said:

@mak the night I installed Kstars, Ill check it out a bit later, it's installed. I like the "what's up tonight" feature, that's a great add on.

Nice for your new filter 82A Lumicon.

I still need to try my new color filters, the #11 on Saturn and Jupiter, It's a lifetime experiment and I to have many interesting colors to try. We have very bad weather for almost 2 weeks now.. it,s terrible outside right now.  Eventually they all will be tested these GSO filters...

 

I like KStars, it can be quirky, but free astronomy stuff can't be bad lol. I had my 102mm Mak/AZ5 out this evening as the sun was out and I tried to catch a setting Venus and Mercury. I had all my filters and everything ready. At about 18:20 GMT I glanced Venus first with the naked eye, then in the RACI. By the time my eye got to the actual eyepiece clouds obscured everything. I didn't see it again!

venusinfuzz2.png.d871cd4465f55434f122138d6d7f737f.png

:angry9:

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This is the last day I have to choose my vacations.. I choose the take them in August because I feel September it's too far away.. I had to split the apple between my need for a vacation and astronomy.  But my 4th available vacation week is the 3rd  of May so this should be a nice week without moon and with not too much insects, for astronomy. (;

Thanks for your help here. (And I still have the option to switch to September :p at the last minute if there is too much work in August)

Yeah!

@Mak the Night

I had my 102mm Mak/AZ5 out this evening as the sun was out and I tried to catch a setting Venus and Mercury. I had all my filters and everything ready. At about 18:20 GMT I glanced Venus first with the naked eye, then in the RACI. By the time my eye got to the actual eyepiece clouds obscured everything. I didn't see it again!

Ahh sorry to hear that, a very common curse.. );

 

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