FreeLists / az-observing / [AZ-Observing] Re: Seeing Conditions at a Dark Site

["Bob Erdmann at ngcic.org" <bobe@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, Bill,

Your question is one which all amateurs starting out tend to ask, and the
answer, I'm sorry to say "depends".  I'm not trying to avoid the question,
its just that after 34 years of amateur observing, from all over Arizona,
there seems to be no hard and fast rules to apply.  There are some definite
generalizations which have to do with geography and time of year which can
help predict, in some broad way, what you can expect, but these are pretty
much "Kentucky windage" kinds of tools.

The best that I can tell you is that if you use an observing site regularly,
you tend to get a sense about its observing "personality", i.e. what you
would generally expect the observing conditions from that site to be, on
average, given the time of year and the geography of the site.  That's not
to say that you won't experience incredibly fantastic seeing every once in a
while, but, what you would expect on average from the particular site.

I think there are some web based tools, such as satellite maps & turbulence
maps that can aid in the decision making process as to which site to use,
but there doesn't seem to be any guarantees associated with the use of them.

Sorry that there doesn't seem to be any "cast in concrete" method of
determining the best site to use, but maybe that's part of the fun of it
all, or the luck of it all.  In general, I tend to use high altitude sites
during the summer until the monsoon season hits, and then its a big crap
shoot.  During the winter months I tend to use the lower elevation, desert
sites, just because I don't have to slog through ice and snow to get to
them.  I've had great seeing at both types of sites, but haven't been able
to predict, with any consistent accuracy, what the seeing would be like
before I actually drove to the site.

I suspect this doesn't help much, but at least you're now in the same boat
as the rest of us :-)

/Bob

---------------------------------------------------------------
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has
endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us
to forgo their use." - Galileo Galilei
---------------------------------------------------------------
Bob Erdmann - Core Team Member & Webmaster
The NGC/IC Project - http://www.ngcic.org
e-mail: bobe@xxxxxxxxx


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