Phew what a scorcher!

[Xilman]

The weather here in La Palma has been most unusually hot for the last week. It is much cooler now, but is still 31C at present. A few days ago it reached 42.6C. We suffer from a calima --- hot dusty air blowing in from the Sahara. the calima comes with high winds which produce terrible seeing, sometimes 15 arc seconds or more.

The electronics on and around the telescope suffered. The FS2 mount controller became very unreliable and died after 30-60 minutes until an old 4" cooling fan was strapped to its side with cable ties.

Some nights were so dusty that naked eye limiting magnitude was +1 and I didn't even try to do any observing, but have managed two nights, most recently last night. Only the latter yielded any usable results. The camera temperature at start of play was 31.5C and the two-stage Peltier with internal and auxiliary fan on the SX 814 camera had a real struggle to get the CCD down to -10C. I forgot to turn on the cooler at first and couldn't work out why the starting shots were so lousy and showed too few stars for plate-solving.

People in the UK can justifiably complain about clouds and rain but at least they don't have to deal with thick dust and nighttime temperatures well over 25C.  The dust, BTW, gets everywhere including on optical surfaces, and that dust is in addition to the fine volcanic ash still blowing around.

[Mandy D]

Yikes! We really should stop complaining about the weather in Britain! I do have some photos of the Sun, taken in Derbyshire, with a Saharan dust cloud covering it that was pretty spectacular.

[Elp]

I'd take hundreds of days of sunshine over what seems like 99pc of perpetual grey year around.

[900SL]

We had the same issues in Saudi. Hitting 50C daytime in summer and not dropping below 35 at night, then on the way out at dawn to avoid re-living the scene from Crematoria in Riddick.

Dust, sand, poor seeing, heat shimmer.  Hard on gear and body.  Beats being in the UK though

 

[DirkSteele]

Reminds of stargazing back in Oman in 2012. First night, one of the best, darkest and most transparent I have ever experienced. Day two, a biblical level sand storm. Seeing a wall of orange slowly approaching is quite something. And that howling sound before it arrived! That night was a write off unsurprisingly. Sadly day three still had loads of fine sand particles in the air and I didn’t want to risk my optics.

 

BTW, Astronomy in your t-shirt (I.e 25C nights) is rather nice in my opinion. Certainly better than dressing like an arctic expedition.

[Xilman]

13 hours ago, DirkSteele said:

BTW, Astronomy in your t-shirt (I.e 25C nights) is rather nice in my opinion. Certainly better than dressing like an arctic expedition.

I agree, when you are outdoors in your t-shirt.  Indoors, sharing a control room with a bunch of electronics and relatively poor ventilation is another matter.

Quite often I ensure the equipment is working then retire to the house and control everything from there.