Ad Astra Observatory

About a week ago, the Pacific NW had a high-pressure system parked over it for several days, which gave them lots of clear (if very cold) weather, and sent a big pile of rain to CA.

Since then, an interesting weather trend has been happening. It rains like crazy, starting sometime around sunrise, goes until about 10am, then clears up for the afternoon. It’s partly cloudy all afternoon, then often clouds up a little right after sunset. Then it’s clear from about 9 until midnight, at which point it clouds up solid, stays cloudy until it starts raining, etc.

This ends up causing a pattern that looks like: “cloudy night early, clears up for a couple hours, clouds up at midnight” followed by “rains for a day, cloudy that night, rains the next morning” followed by “clear for a few hours after dark, then clouds up at midnight”…

It’s done this 3 times in a row in the past week or 10 days. So I have been getting plenty of short sky sessions, which is just perfect for a little tuning and would be really irritating if I was going to try to image.

Also the mosquitoes are back in force, and it’s very cold and moist out at night. Leather jacket and sweater keeps the chest warm, but jeans are too thin.