yay the skies have finally cleared in sydney!! Its a little bit windy but im still gunna get the scope out to give my new Pentax XW 7mm eyepiece its first go!!!!
The numerical weather prediction was for it to clear in Sydney on the night of Sat/Sun 16&17th January sometime around midnight after days and days of cloudy and sometimes rainy sky. Jet-stream maps and the numerical weather also predicted good to very good seeing.
For what it's worth, from my own experience and after looking at the cloud pics and animations, I agreed and thought 11pm was possible, maybe even probable for the low-pressure trough and associated storm-front to pass over. There was a nice big pool of cool, stable and clear air behind it -- maybe 10 hrs worth. Having had little telescope time in the last few months, I was pretty deperate ...
As we'd thought, drove down to my spot near Bargo in rain/thunderstorm, arrived just before 9pm. It was almost dark, still raining moderately with lots of puddles on the ground and a few little creeks running here and there across the strip west to east. Gary arrived about 9.20pm by then the rain had thinned out to odd-spots, then light drizzle and finally stopped.
Just after 10pm we (Gary, Serge & myself) decided to head down the recreation club for a quick-one in the hope that if we paid no attention to the sky and pretended we wern't all that interested, it might clear-up while we were there. Besides, there were a couple of lightning-flashes to the southwest that looked a little threatening ...
We arrived down at the club and couldn't get in as they were closing in 1/2 hr. We thought about going to the pub instead and went to get back in the cars when we noticed a few stars started to poking-out through the clouds so we headed back to the strip.
By 10.45pm it was clearing rapidly and we began to set-up. 11.30pm totally clear and stayed that way until we left at 3.50am. The seeing was pretty good without being sensational. Very dewy for January. Spent some time in Antlia road-testing my own column for the latest issue of AS&T and seeing some new objects there and then in Carina and Centaurus. Good look at the Homunculus. First look at Saturn for the year about 3am -- nice.
More detailed report will probably follow later if I don't get side-tracked ...
