The Skies are Gettin’ Good

Image Credit: Marchetype

The clean, cold, crisp nights of winter are THE best for observing. The fact that here in the northern hemisphere we get more starlight hours helps too. This is the season of the amateur astronomer.

At no point in the year will we get clearer, stable skies. The boiling atmosphere of a hot day is now gone (for the most part) and the air cools rapidly as the Sun sets over the mountains. The average seeing at night improves by a factor of two over that of a summer evening (seeing is a measure of how still the atmosphere is, usually expressed in arcseconds. A crappy night is 5 arcseconds, with 10 being typical in Boulder in the summer months. That improves to 3 arcseconds after a snowstorm and a huge cold front passing through in the winter).

There’s nothing like going out on the night after a huge snowstorm passes by. The air is quiet and still, the snow crunches loudly under your feet, the air freezes your snot as you breathe through your nose.

As you approach your telescope, the ice crystals glinting off starlight, you peer into the eyepiece and see the Orion nebula, brighter and with more contrast that you can ever remember seeing. The bright green glow from the nebula almost casts a glow around your eye.

Ahh, there’s nothing like being an amateur astronomer…

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