To move or not to move, that is the question

[Somnium (Aidan)]

so today i purchased a property in Mount kuring gai, i will be moving there in the first week of December. the place i got is next to the national park and has a relatively unobstructed view of the sky. the thinking is that i could move my observatory up to sydney, that would reduce the multiple hour drives to fix something stupid (to be fair that has only happened twice), but the light pollution would be much worse. i guess the key factor here is the seeing conditions. based on the data i am getting most nights I am convinced that my observatory is currently sitting at the bottom of a lake. if moving up near sydney provides better seeing conditions then i am happy to sacrifice the dark skies and integrate more subs. the big problem is that i have no way of measuring the conditions in any really accurate way, and if it is replacing like for like seeing then i would rather keep the dark skies ... i sold my NEQ6 so i cant set up a scope in sydney and monitor the sky ... any thoughts ?

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

You might be surprised. Friends of mine used to live in St Ives Chase and it wasn't half bad so long as you didn't look south. There's nothing to the east and west and the Central coast is down in a dip from there. Seeing is perhaps harder to judge but I pushed 400x a few times up round there with my SCT.

[glend (Glen)]

It gets worse every year, doesn't matter what urban area you live in. If you want to just shoot narrowband it should be fine. I would keep the observatory down south, maybe put some work into improving remote operarion to make it more autonomous.

[PRejto (Peter)]

I've managed to do RGB from North Curl Curl but not without a struggle. So has Peter Ward. from a different part f Sydney. Sometimes the seeing is quite decent in terms of FWHM but often it just isn't dark enough, especially if there is moisture in the air. Nonetheless, I've found that really long integration times can pay off. This is what 40+ hours can do with cooperating sky. I've had to develop special techniques to deal with bad gradients in the RGB data.

http://www.astrobin.com/full/252836/0/

In 3 years my kids will be done with school and I will be moving "somewhere" with a dark sky. Good luck. Hard decision!

Peter

[multiweb (Marc)]

Looking at LP maps, south of Sydney is much darker than central coast. Given than the southern part of the sky is also the most interesting I'd move south.

[Somnium (Aidan)]

The automation i have set up is pretty good, it works reliably. the only time recently that i had to do down was due to my brother leaving the internet disconnected, not very happy about that one. it is mainly the seeing conditions that bug me.

[Somnium (Aidan)]

Originally Posted by multiweb

Looking at LP maps, south of Sydney is much darker than central coast. Given than the southern part of the sky is also the most interesting I'd move south.

thanks Marc, but unfortunately i have to move north, my wife will start working on the central coast in December