Been up here for 7 nights now over the New Moon and 5 have turned it on with clear skies, plus one partially clear night the other it rained but cleared up around 2am...hard to complain about that
. Tonight is magical, once again dark and steady, great transparency and pretty good seeing (750X on Saturn and Jupiter is quite useable again!) Humidity is also once again very low and with the addition of a good weather station, installed today, I can see it is currently 67% at 1:15am and sitting at 0.5degC with a 0.0km/hr wind ie none, very clear air with no fog, just a veeery fine frost forming on the ground still no fog on the scope optics either without dew heaters! ...nice, very happy
Edit: for those interested, just finished another fantastic nights observing (packed up at 3:30am) under excellent skies, every viewing condition parameter was excellent, dark, no wind, low humidity all night (still only at 75% at 4:30am), great transparency and good to excellent seeing. Highlights were, checked out Jupiter and Saturn through the night between observing other things, as the views and seeing got better and better, culminating in the best most detailed and colourful views just before 3:30am. Spent a bit of time galaxy surfing around Fornax, Eridanus and Cetus at lots of the faintest little galaxies I could find with the Skywatcher data base, had fun checking out lots of Mag 12, 13, and 14 examples, all quite easy to see in such excellent conditions, even cracked Mag 15.1, NGC 135, a 330 Million light year distant galaxy in Cetus
. Would have liked to have had a shot at something fainter but couldnt find anything in the Sky Watcher data bases
Spotted the Andromeda galaxy and M33 in the north naked eye, as well as the Nova in Ophiuchus (~Mag 6.5)
Had an absolute ball!
Touch wood
..so far (winter), every viewing session (about 9 or 10 now) at Eagleview has been superb, with some just more superb than others, it's been quite thrilling really
The sky is dark but the biggest surprise has been the lack of humidity (never any dew on anything, haven't needed dew heaters!) and the high transparency and sky contrast.
Mike