Unusual weather

A-L-E-X · 10 Dec 2018 03:46

and pristine views of the stars!

Stellarator · 10 Dec 2018 04:02

and pristine views of the stars!

Hmmm, well, most of the time. Sad to say, but this years has not been kind to me as far as astronomy goes. Between a haptic work schedule and atrocious weather conditions, my night-time observations were severely limited. During springtime we had lots of clouds and rain, followed by a summer of bad wildfires throughout BC (and Canada/the rest of the world in general). The sky was just a dirty-yellow color, or a ash-grey. Magnitude at any time was above +4 (i.e, the sun was barely visible during the day). This was in addition to dangerous air quality due to widespread ash fallout. I tell you A-L-E-X, sometimes it was like a warzone out there!

For most of the autumn and now in the winter, I've had clouds again. The only break from this was when I hiked to a nearby mountain range with my 'scope and binoculars with some friends last month. At roughly 2000m elevations, the night-time view was literally beyond this world. I spent no less then five hours constantly observing - mostly 'surfing' Cygnus dust clouds, but also seeking out some old deep-sky favorites in Leo and Virgo that I had been meaning to observe and measure months prior. All in all, it was a great reprieve from the year's toils and responsibilities. When I got back home, few people believed I had actually spent five hours awake at night up in the mountains just looking at stars

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A-L-E-X · 10 Dec 2018 04:23

Wow your weather has mimicked ours, there has barely been more than a few days of decent viewing since the summer. The haze from the wildfires actually made it over here, which made for some colorful sunsets but bad for any kind of viewing, and its been cloudy 90% of the time anyway.

There really is no substitute for the mountains! Lots of galaxies in Leo and Virgo and Cygnus has some amazing nebulae!

10 Dec 2018 07:27

Winter is definitely here:

A meter to fall in the mountains over the next 72 hours. And after that, it keeps going:

midtskogen · 10 Dec 2018 08:49

And snow's here to stay at last, after two failed attempts. I went cross country skiing in the forests of Oslo for the first time on Saturday. A few weeks later than last year, but still pretty normal. The previous trip was on 1 May, so a gap of 7 months and 7 days.

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PlutonianEmpire · 16 Dec 2018 06:30

In the meantime, all the snow weve gotten is gonna melt over the next week, with temps above freezing (32° F) the whole time:

Our snow is half gone already atm

I am personally expecting yet another brown christmas this year. 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 have ALL been brown Xmas'es. It never used to be this way for MN. It sucks

midtskogen · 16 Dec 2018 10:16

Winter had to make three attempts here, the first in late October, second in late November, both times it rained away after a few days, and finally on the 6th December 20 cm of snow came to stay and a white Christmas is a sure thing according to the forecast. But we have a 80-90% chance of white Christmas. Very occasionally snow doesn't arrive to stay intul around New Year.

Stellarator · 16 Dec 2018 23:35

Yeah, my snow is on its way out too

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18 Dec 2018 01:19

Still going strong here. 190cm fell at Baker in the last 7 days, and another 50cm falling above 900masl tonight and tomorrow, with 100kph wind. This has been a pretty crazy winter so far with a lot of avalanche activity. Excited to get up there once conditions settle down a bit...

A-L-E-X · 18 Dec 2018 01:31

Nice season of extremes going on, we had a 6 inch snowstorm in November and 0 snow in December and none forthcoming, just lots of windy and wet weather!

vlad01 · 18 Dec 2018 01:45

I missed out on the Geminid meteor show for it's entirety due to a freak weather system which caused floods throughout much of the state of Victoria and NSW here in Aus. After weeks and weeks of good weather, my luck.

Only luck I had was I missed out on the flooding itself. We get little rain in our local area. Most places got 100-150mm+ in 1 to 2 days and we got 40mm over 5 days at most 10mm in one day. So it was very annoying to miss out on the Geminids for bugger all rain anyway. We also had 2 days mostly with no power, about 15 hours or so over 2 days of blackout which was related to the storms.

My friend was going to get his DSLR out for it, but he also had bad luck when 2 days before his gf dropped a bucket on water on it when cleaning out the fish tank and killed the camera lol

Gnargenox · 18 Dec 2018 22:31

Chilean Andes at 4300m yesterday.

midtskogen · 19 Dec 2018 01:26

Cool. Also the upside down Orion.

19 Dec 2018 01:33

Very neat photo. Just the right amount of moonlight to illuminate the ground and lenticular cloud, and not too much to drown out the stars.

vlad01 · 20 Dec 2018 00:32

Cool. Also the upside down Orion.

It's the right way around

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