Whining about the Weather

Ah, Minnesota in Winter. Some things that make observing during Winter special:

• Looking through an eyepiece only to have your eye begin to tear. That water sloshing around on your eye hardly helps you see clearly.  Usually it leads to frost on the eyepiece lens, and sometimes the joy of having a drop fall onto your eyepiece lens and freeze solid. Heaven help you if your eye bumps into an eyepiece that's at a temperature of -6° F.
• Snow amplifies sky brighness. Even dark-sky friendly lights can turn against you when their light bounces upward off the white stuff.
• Cold fingers. Which are marginally better than fingers coated with plastic-dissolving DEET needed to fend off mosquitoes.
• Cold feet. They say that the way to keep the extremeties warm is to keep the torso toasty. There's a limit to how many layers one can wear and still have use of one's arms and legs.
• Stiff mounts. The pasty goop that's used to lubricate most mounts can get very grippy in the cold, making drive motors labor duing slews. And they can get noisy too. I had a mount that whined when the temperature fell below zero. (Much like myself.)
• Feeble hand control displays. Some of these can become almost useless as the cold increases the display latency.
• Dead batteries.  Most batteries don't like being used in very cold temperatures, and give up the ghost far sooner than you might expect.
• Deep snow. Planting a tripod or work table in the deep snow can be difficult.
• The neighbors' backyard lit Christmas decorations. Not to wax humbuggy, but really, twinking lights seem much less festive when you're trying to hunt down something that's at the limits of your telescope and observing skills, your eyes are full of tears, your fingers are stiff with cold and the mount is screeching in your ears.  Just keep telling yourself, "Astronomy is a fun hobby."

So what to do, curl up next to the furnace until March?  Aside from earning the derision of the good folks up in Canada, sitting indoors will make you miss the splendor of the Winter sky. Get yourself some hand warmers for your hands and the hand controller. Get some really good winter wear. It's OK if you look like an escaped balloon from a Thanksgiving day parade so long as you're warm. Regrease your mount.

DO NOT use your .22 rifle to shoot out the neighbors' lights. That's both illegal and ineffective, as anyone who has ever watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas knows. (The cartoon version, of course.)

Best advice: Move someplace else. The worst thing about winter in Minnesota isn't the cold, it's the clouds. Take a look at this from the excellent web site ClimateStations.com:

This shows the percent of time the sky isn't clear enough for looking through anything better than "sucker holes," breaks in the clouds that optimists take as a sign that the sky is clearing.  During those long winter nights we generally spend more than half our time under cloud cover. What fun!

OK, enough whining.  The next clear night I'll be in the back yard humming something from the Grinch. Why just humming? Because my face will be frozen.