Quote:
Originally Posted by JA
Hi Eric,
It's interesting that you should mention Arkaroola, as I just visited a web page about the observatory there, as a result of web-browsing seeing conditions based on interest created in this thread.
Anyway, I thought you all might be interested in this comment, although based on 50 year old data....
"For those of you with a technical mind, the seeing conditions at Mt. Searle (only 47 km to the south-west) were measured in 1965 by the Australian National University (ANU) and reported as being a mean of 0.45 arc-seconds, with seeing better than 0.35 arc-seconds on 36% of nights. Our night skies are truly spectacular! "
Here is the page: https://www.arkaroola.com.au/astronomy.php
Can anyone vouch for the nearby Mt. Searle ?
Maybe it's a small world and someone here, is from there.
Best
JA |
I think those numbers are incorrect. I dug out the original report from Hogg 1965 (see attached PDF), and he talks about a CARSO Automatic Seeing Monitor and a Danjon 'to' parameter (the latter needs to be multiplied by 2 to be somewhat equivalent to the former). I don't think either can be interpreted as the FWHM we measure with our modern sensors.
On my
webpage I reproduce the graph from Wood et al 1995 that is mentioned elsewhere in this thread. That data is fits in with my observations.
I think I could improve my local seeing if I could cool my dome late afternoon before nightfall (sorta like the CFHT obs in the link Shiraz points to), but running on solar power+batteries only means a very small AC unit
A project I have been thinking about is adding more fans to the CDK20 to cool the mirror better/faster. The later model CDKs (17/24) have extra fans on the side of the tube, alas mine predates that innovation, I wonder if it makes a big difference.
EB