What a February!
By James
Since I last posted the rest of February 2017 has happened… there’s not a whole lot more to say than that.
Last month wasn’t quite as bad as last June, but it came perilously close for a while. It’s been cloudy and wet most of the time, but I’ve managed to grab a handful of brief sessions with my smaller scopes.
The fact that the Moon is lovely and high at this time of year has been helpful, though many of the best opportunities have been around New Moon ironically. I say that because there’s a theory that it’s only ever clear when the Moon is in the sky. Admittedly it’s a theory of Deep-Sky observers, but we couldn’t complain about that too much this February.
Still the skies weren’t Deep-Sky clear: the Transparency has been poor due to the high levels of humidity. I believe that the unseasonable warmth is a problem since the moisture hasn’t been forced out of the local atmosphere by sustained freezing temperatures. I’ve often been out observing at midnight at temperatures around 10ºC this winter, and that isn’t normal from a long term historical perspective.
The beautiful twinkling stars are a really bad sign for the observational astronomer. They’re symptomatic of poor Seeing and I suspect the polar Jet stream has been a frequent visitor overhead. When this happens everything is blurred like you’re viewing it at the bottom of a swimming pool. So seeing small features on the Moon or planets is out, and so is splitting tighter double stars.
So I’ve spent February as a bit of an astronomical tourist, just visiting the brighter Messier and NGC objects, the Moon and even Venus as the conditions allowed a half hour of clearish sky. No time for notes or sketches, I’ve considered myself lucky to get the telescope set up before the clouds reappeared.
That’s been OK, though rarely as relaxing as a quick tourist session should be, but it’s also frustrating when my Herschel 400 project has stall, the remaining binocular Messiers are a no-go, and my Variable stars are nearly a month overdue.
Let’s hope for kinder weather in the coming Spring before British Summer Time (BST) arrives and the Solar season is upon us.