Clear skies, heavy dew

[Merlin66]

We, down here in the Bellarine, are sitting under a High pressure which is giving some nice clear days, and nights.
I was doing some spectroscopy last night on Eta Car and the signal started to fade..random cloud??

Finished the run and immediately saw the reason..the scope/ corrector etc. were saturated - heavy dew!
Not something I'm familiar with down here - had major issues while based in the UK, and I have a dew shield and dew heaters, but never needed them - until now!
Today's job will be to ensure everything has dried out in the observatory, find and fit the dew shield and heaters...

[glend]

It was a problem here as well last night. Beautiful clear night and the Seeing after midnight was great but the humidity was 94%. I had intended to have a look at Saturn but just never bothered opening the observatory roof.

[jamespierce]

Agreed! I've had 5 completely clear nights at the observatory ... but ~85% humidity and very cold every night. The dehumidifier is working overtime in the mornings.


Still compared to the rubbish weather of the last few months this has been quite the treat.

[Quopaz]

Got the same problem here. If there's no clouds then there's heavy dew. The nice Summer dew free nights have gone. This morning I was going by 4am and it was pretty cold but not too bad, grass was wet from dew. Finderscope kept getting wet on the lens. Got some pretty good (for me) saturn/mars footage trying out a 3x barlow instead of 2x. Finished by 6am and when I left for work at 7am the car windscreen had ice all over it that the wipers couldn't shift and a fair bit of frost around.

[multiweb]

Same here in Sydney last night. Very heavy dew and sudden drop in temperature played havoc with keeping in focus even with temperature compensation. Had to go out and "tweak" every half hour. Seeing was pretty good until I went to bed around midnight. It was still clear and the moon was down around 23:30.

[pgc hunter]

I get insane dew out here in winter aswell. When I say insane, I mean INSANE, you'd be forgiven for thinking it rained overnight.