February 14, 2010: Willow Springs

Robert Ayers

I visited my primitive astro-site at the 3000 foot level of Willow Springs on Sunday.

NOAA had been optimistic, but the early-Sunday forecast for Sunday evening included "patchy dense fog". I had never seen NOAA forecast fog for my site so what the heck ...

Arriving before sunset, the entire sky was lightly hazed, with many ancient contrails about. One could watch airplanes adding long-lasting contrails: there clearly was one humid high layer ... After sunset, the haze was less visible (but probably still present).

Near the end of twilight, the zodiacal light in the west was very nice. As we were admiring it, though, we noticed that the southern horizon-line on the far side of the Panoche Valley got all blurry. And then more-local ridge-lines in the south were getting blurry ... And look: there is a "fog patch", just as advertised, sliding from south to north just below our site :-) It was fun to watch the fog, but it wasn't astronomy. And the fact that the fog was easy to watch reminded one that the horizons were abnormally bright (from the same haze).

I observed (manly admired the night sky) for awhile. I had my binoculars+mount out, and did some nebula-filter observing on Mon and Ori. But the illuminated horizons were making it brighter than normal and the dewing was strong.

We left at about 9pm and drove through a thin fog layer at about 2500 feet on the way down to Kevin's

Bob Ayers