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My location in the Bavarian Forest is at an altitude of 900m/2900ft and very dark, but more on the wet side with typically just a few clear nights per month. Yet I have seen enough fantastic dark and dry nights to build a small observatory in 2020 and to enjoy a lot of beautiful observation sessions and create great deep-sky images. Since about 2 years the number of usable nights has dropped drastically because of a high-altitude haze present almost every clear night. Typically bright stars have a massive blueish halo. During daylight the sky almost never is really blue. I am wondering where this change comes from. One thing may be that due to the war in Ukraine a flight route from the near and far east to north-western Europe and parts of North America going through our area is a lot busier. This obviously leads to more condensation trails. But what also - in my impression - has changed in the last two years is that the contrails much more often persist and spread out to create this layer of haze. I am wondering if this might be due to generally more humidity in the atmosphere (which in turn might be due to climate change). As a scientist I am aware that there are a lot of "maybes" here and that one should not jump to conclusions to quickly. But the effect (my observatory no longer usable) is very real and I would like to understand whats going on. Has anyone made similar experiences at their site ? Goetz |
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Hi Goetz, same situation at my place, close to Bremen Airport, which is a high altitude flight crossing waypoint . Most flights coming from London, Amsterdam, Paris and heading to East ( China etc.) Also the overall weather situation since the last couple of years, especially in winter-time, is getting worse. For month like October to March almost every day overcast ! Also impacting my photovoltaic electricity production system quite heavily. cheers Wanni |
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Servus beinand, i am imaging from a location near passau at around 500 meters altitude. Good night sky and while clear nights could be more i would say that my imaging time is pretty stable the last few years. i don’t image every clear night and i only image if the whole night is clear and i still got around 120? hours of imaging time this year. guess local seeing can vary a lot and i really hope i don’t get the same problems you have. cs Andi |
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| There was a long-lasting El Niño last year. I am not sure if it impacted your observatory, but it did cause some large-scale weather pattern. Things may regress. |
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I can't speak for the last 2 years but for climate what I can tell is that in the last 8 months I've never experienced so many heatwaves. The weather since September last year was really unusual. I'm in the other side of planet but I can tell you that I've experienced 4 heatwaves in the last 8 months and I've never experienced that before. This very weekend was suposed to be ~22ºc average but it was 31ºc I hope this is just a temporary and unusual El niño phenomena so you get your dark sky back cs |
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| You raise an interesting topic. I have the same feeling that the number of cloudy nights has increased the last two winters in Vienna. Yet, I do not fully trust my meteo-judgement, as we astronomers tend to complain constantly about bad weather, and I am no exception! It would be interesting to see some hard meteo statistical data, to get the real trend. |
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You raise an interesting topic. I have the same feeling that the number of cloudy nights has increased the last two winters in Vienna. Yet, I do not fully trust my meteo-judgement, as we astronomers tend to complain constantly about bad weather, and I am no exception! It would be interesting to see some hard meteo statistical data, to get the real trend. I fully agree: it would be really interesting to get some reputable statistical data about clear nights, but also about air humidity at higher altitudes and even on flight movements over a certain area. For a start I might write a little email to the german meteo service (DWD) to see if they have any hints. If I do that and get a useful answer I will let you know. BTW: It seems that there is a lot of science already going on about the connection of contrails and our climate: https://blog.google/technology/ai/ai-airlines-contrails-climate-change/ |
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Yes, interesting topic indeed. I use the contrails to "predict" the quality of my observation night, if they are short, long, or they disperse fast, or they become wider and so on. This is an example of what I consider widening of the contrail. |
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This paper suggested a connection between cirrus clouds and contrails due to air traffic: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/17/8/1520-0442_2004_017_1671_cctac_2.0.co_2.xml Here is a more general article: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/78154/the-evolution-of-a-contrail |
