04 December 2005

4 December 2005

Observing
Location		New York City
Observational
Period
Atmospheric
Conditions		I didn't need to look at the Clear Skies Clock to know there wouldn't be any occultations tonight. I can hear the rain drumming on the windowsill and it is darker than it should be.

Clear Sky Clock graphic

Comparing their prediction with the NOAA chart for the next 24 hours I am not sure where they get the clear skies between 1900 EST and 2200 EST.

NOAA graphic

The AccuWeather combined satellite and radar map shows that we are currently entering a window in the clouds that will likely last a few hours before it clouds over again.

AccuWeather graphic

Neither of the first two charts bode well for the private party I was supposed to provide optics for at the South Street Seaport tomorrow night. More snow is on the way.

Instruments
Observing
Party

I have reported on several occasions on seeing what I have called "negative contrails" - a dark stripe through a patch of cloud. I speculated that they might have been caused by the heat of the jet exhaust boiling away the cloud. While scanning the Universe Today news articles at the bottom of my blog I saw a picture of a contrail shadow made by Rick Stankiewicz. This is another possible explanation but I have seen them late at night when the sun-earth-cloud geometry was very different from what appears in Rick's photograph so it might not have been the same phenomena.

Photo Credit Rick Stankiewicz

posted by Charlie at 17:07

Disclaimer
This is my personal record of my astronomical observations. It was written for my personal reference. The only reason it is in a blog is that a blog is a very convenient way to get the records formatted more or less uniformly and they will, hopefully, have greater longevity at Google where the servers are backed up than on my hard drive which never gets backed up. I occasionally include copyrighted material in my posts. I do this to make it convenient for me to access things I think I might want to refer to again. I think of this like making a photocopy of something I read that I put in a file where I can find it when I want it. As I understand copyright law, as explained in the DVD series Copyright Compliance by Chip Taylor Communications, this use is allowed under the Fair Use doctrine since I am not making any money on this blog, I don’t publicize the blog, and only occasionally post small excerpts of copyrighted works.


Disclosure
This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. This blog does not accept any form of advertising, sponsorship, or paid insertions. We write for our own purposes. However, we may be influenced by our background, occupation, religion, political affiliation or experience.

The owner(s) of this blog will never receive compensation in any way from this blog.

The owner(s) of this blog is not compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the blog owners. If we claim or appear to be experts on a certain topic or product or service area, we will only endorse products or services that we believe, based on our expertise, are worthy of such endorsement. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer or provider.

This blog does not contain any content which might present a conflict of interest.