This is a somewhat annual reminder that the gegenschein
is now in a good spot in the sky to go out and look for it.
Here are some recent images of it taken in
late-evening from the Lowell Anderson Mesa site:
ftp://ftp.lowell.edu/pub/bas/20161022-gegen.jpg
ftp://ftp.lowell.edu/pub/bas/20161023-gegen.jpg
...and an image from a couple weeks ago of the
morning zodiacal light:
ftp://ftp.lowell.edu/pub/bas/20161014_zodi.jpg
These were all cloud-free nights, so all the
structure you see in the sky background is from
the night-airglow (i.e. actually in the foreground).
The airglow has been active enough that one of our
DCT telescope operators thought they were cirrus clouds.
SQM meter readings were ~0.3 mag brighter than values
typical when the airglow is quiescent.
The annotations in the images show bright stars
but also mark the locations of the telescopes active
at the time the image was taken. Thus on the Oct 22 image,
I was using our 1.8-m Perkins telescope to get polarimetry
of Be stars NGC 457, while our robotic 31-inch telescope
was hitting one of a long list of T Tauri stars between
the Pleiades and Hyades.
\Brian
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