Seeing in Melbourne tonight

[Stonius]

Interesting - Cloudy nights has the jetstream at near zero velocity, but meteoblue is predicting only fairly average seeing to 1.3 arc seconds.

I'm hosting a dinner party and probably won't get out to have a look. I'd be interested to hear from others what I missed out on.

Markus

[Atmos]

I'm going to set my 4" out and check out the planets and the moon :)

[morls]

I'm planning to set up and check whether the seeing is good enough for my 8mm on the planets. Up to now the best has been a couple of nights ago, but it was still not happening. The 15mm has been great at 180x

8mm gives me 337x so I'm probably pushing it...

[Stonius]

So how was it? Any reports?

Im curious. ��

[Atmos]

It appears to be quite good!
Cassini Division was very crisp in my 4” at 225x along with some really nice tonal colours on Saturn itself.

The GRS was very prominent on Jupiter along with quite a lot of detail within the cloud bands.

Mars was crisp and it appears that a lot of the dust has subsided as surface details are quite easy to spot along with the polar ice cap.

[morls]

The seeing was great last night. Cassini very clear, GRS easily found, and as a rough estimate limiting magnitude naked eye was around 4.1 in eastern suburbs of Melbourne with 97% full moon.

Omega Centauri was beautiful with my new 35mm Panoptic. I had an optimistic look for Centaurus A, but no luck. I also tried the 8mm on the planets, but it was still too much. I think 300x might have been possible but I don't have a 9mm or 10mm yet...

[Stonius]

Thanks for the reports, guys. So it would seem it *was better than average.

Makes me wonder about the meteoblue algorithm. There is must be another factor in there that stops the seeing index dropping when the atmosphere and jetstream is quite still.

Interesting...

Markus

[andyc]

Interesting little read - I've been mulling over the Meteoblue seeing estimates for a while - on average, SkippySky does better than Meteoblue for me. I have a forecast like what you're seeing for this evening - Skippy's going for 8/9 and a quiet jetstream here, but meteoblue is forecasting mush. I think it'll be a decent night!

The flipside is that I often see Skippy go for 8/9 seeing when the jetstream is raging, and that tends to lead to disappointment too...

[multiweb]

Looks good here too in Sydney for tonight. Might get the Mewlon out and have a peek at the moon and a few planets. :stargaze:

PS: Well I had a quick look at Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. Then had a peek at the Jewelbox. Views were sharp at times, especially Saturn and Mars but nothing to brag about though. Conditions were so so.

[MattT]

Is this cloud free night screen shot for Friday morning later this week believable? If so that could be the third time this year I could look through a telescope...

[morls]

I hope so, although I'm hesitant to trust a forecast more than 24 hours out...