It’s been a winter. Last year I think we had to snowblow 3 times.
This is #8. At least 3 ice storms, snowstorm, melt, snowstorm, melt, etc.etc.
We had +7C just a few days ago then 25cm of snow as of yesterday.. then it plunged to -24C this morning.
This is a time lapse I made with my smartphone.. until it shut down because it was too cold!
*update*
The next day had another 5cm of snow.. not enough for the snowblower so out came the shovel.
And finally.. after 44 days of cloudy skies and or frigid temperatures, the skies cleared on 2026 January 8th and this was the first imaging session from the Serenity Observatory at SCGO.
This is Jupiter, just a few days shy of opposition. It was low in the sky during the clear skies portion of the evening, only 33 degrees of altitude up, hence some of the atmospheric dispersion going on, blue on the upper right and red on the lower left.
This was the best 5% of 22K frames, each of 4ms in duration. Jupiter is a whopping 46.5 arcseconds across. Seeing was poor, transparency was poor.
The telescope and mount behaved well after not being powered up in almost two month.
All in all it was great to get back outside.. lets hope for some more Clear Skies!
We have a Hardware AcuRite 06004 weather station installed on 2019 November 27th.
There is space for batteries in the back but they never kept it going during power outages.. this year we have had 6 or more.
Each time the weather station goes down, data capture stops, etc. It got so frustrating that Something Had To Be Done.
The indoor receiver buttons have also mostly failed and it is a horribly time consuming event to reprogram it to the correct units, date, time, usb data transfer, etc.
A complete computer Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) cost starts at $200+. So instead we have taken a small MFLASH 5000mAh Rubberized Power Bank (MFPWR0501PLBLKR) approx $11 and put it inline from the wall power to the raspberry pi weewx data logger and also to the weather station receiver.
It is functioning now as a mini UPS and so far so good… now we just have to wait for the next power outage 🙂
Another trip around the Sun, another round of creating expectations and benchmarks for the remainder of the next orbit.
2025 – I did not meet my goal of 50 imaging sessions… I got to #49 in mid November and nothing after that. Between cloud and cold, it just did not happen.
So that left staying inside and catching up on some reading.
This “Missions to Mars” book was an excellent read for anyone interested in planetary science, especially Mars.
For 2026.. lets aim at 50 imaging sessions again and see what happens!