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Last week, Thursday I think, I tried taking Gus out in the backyard for a session. After about 1/2 hour, it became apparent the sky was terrible. The sky dome glow toward the west was 45 degrees, whereas its usually 20 degrees or less. Thinking about it, I realized that A) it was a warm 80 degrees and B) there is a lot of smog in the air. Needless to say, I aborted my session after looking at M57 and my work "Vulcan" star field. So I was pretty disappointed.
Interestingly, this last Saturday evening at work, up at Lick on Tycho Brahe Peak at the Crocker Dome, doing my Vulcan Camera planet search project, I happened to go outside the dome for a bit during one of the long image data runs about 2 AM. To my chagrin, the smog to the west over San Jose looked like a thick blanket of coal soot! The sky dome glow from my vantage point was terrible - probably 30 degrees or more! My image sets are to go until dawn and end up in the west so I was a bit worried about imaging in all that crud as my scope tracked the target westward. But happily the 7 minute CCD exposures seemed to average out the crud and only produced slightly different image sets. By the way, the skies to the Southeast, East and North were superb so only over the city was there a problem.
So there you have it. SMOG not only is bad to breathe but it ruins our seeing too.
Starry Eyed Peggy