Dreadful seeing tonight...

[Vega]

Had a quick gander at the moon and Jupiter through the ED80. Jupiter was an awful jibbering mess. Anyone else find the atmosphere darn right awful tonight?

ps its quite a warm one for end of September (15deg C at the mo!) , probably somthing to do with it

Matt

[George]

Wall to wall cloud for the last 4 nights, Thurs is looking good tho.

[lunator]

it was a bit hit & miss last night.

Some periods of steady seeing and then a period of 'mush'

Cheers

Ian

[brianb]

Don't know where you are but the jet stream is slowly moving south ... You're lucky to be seeing anything at all, solid grey cloud here for 10 days except for 2 x 5 min windows when the sun was visible.

[Talitha]

Matt, do you have anything like this that you could check ahead of time?

IIRC it's an aviation page. The graphic shows where the Jet Stream is, and is predicted to be.. very helpful.

[Vega]

Not thought of checking where the ole stream is... I live in Somerset so it may have taken a trip quite far South. I often find these things are not an exact science so I tend not to link seeing with the jetstream too closely (Go out and have a gander, is my rule). I find cloud prediction however can be forecast quite easily with satellite data.

Matt

[James]

Seeing in Taunton was fantastic last night - but that may have had something to do with there being only 300 metres of air to look through before hitting solid cloud

James

[callump]

Did a public meeting in Chipping Sodbury last night. Early on it was wall-to-wall cloud, but these parted during my talk, and then afterwards the sky was pretty clear, though the seeing was awful too. However, the punters were happy to be able to see Jupiter, and Callisto and Ganymede - couldn't see Io and Europa, but checking in Stellarium later, its likely they were behind or too near the disk. And the moon was o.k. at low magnification. Later was able to see M31 without much difficulty - though not naked eye from the site.

/callump

[brianb]

I tend not to link seeing with the jetstream too closely (Go out and have a gander, is my rule). I find cloud prediction however can be forecast quite easily with satellite data.

Go out and have a look by all means. Observation of "faint fuzzies" is not much affected by jet stream smearing, even if it's so bad that it's hard to focus a star at x100.

Satellite data is quite useful for predicting large weather features but the infra red images (which are all that is available at night) are totally hopeless at detecting low level stratus, which can roll in off the sea with little or no warning and completely wipe out all types of observation.

[Vega]

Must admit, due to the cloud I didnt bother hunting down DSO's. Just looked at moon an Jupi in the gaps.

James: Proof that seeing for planets is very much a local effect. It could have just been from the traffic/houses to the South of my location. Or it could have been the time of night. I was only observing between 9:45 - 10:15.

Matt

[DaveS]

Had a look with my resurected 60mm. Shouldn't have bothered. LP so bad from west London nothing below 2nd mag visible. Jupiter was boiling, did see a couple of belts, but only intermittently. Moon was a little better, but still very turbulent. Did a check on Altair, one ring visible intermitently but boiling all over. Used a 9mm Ortho for all, magnification 79.

Dave

[Takahashi]

the jet stream is slowly moving south ...

Is that what's responsible for the horrible haze that's swamping an otherwise-clear sky?

[ZOG]

I had something similar on Saturday night. Jupiter, which was directly above an extremely bright street light, was very acceptable showing 4 bands and 4 moons.

M13 which is in my western horizon and darker than the South wouldn't resolve to anything more than a fuzzy blob. This normally resolves to lots of individual stars.

Weird