This week would be a prime time for heading out to Lac qui Parle state park for some dark sky imaging. But there's some serious smoke action ruining that plan. Here's what the smoke looks like from space.
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| The location of Lac qui Parle State Park is given by the red dot |
Fortunately for the health of people in the Dakotas and western Minnesota it's all far above the ground and the air we breathe.
This is a blue light satellite image from late in the day of 12 June. Both Dakotas are under multiple smoke decks; you can see the layering across western Minnesota where each layer casts a shadow onto the layer beneath it. The eastern edge of the smoke is slowly pushing eastward.
I can't say I'm confident
this will clear out during the coming new moon weekend of 16-18 June.
Western Canada continues to burn.
It's already complicated trying to forecast clouds and adding smoke makes it all the more difficult. Clear or cloudy? Transparent or murky? The decision to travel an hour or more to a dark sky location has become an exercise in nowcasting.
In some ways this is much the same as a cloud deck. It may not be opaque, but the extinction is formidable. In the image below of north central south dakota you can see contrails at flight level casting shadows onto the smoke!
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Two issues may have been resolved last night. The glitchy behavior of my QHY5LII guide camera was absent with the USB cable connected to a USB3 port, and I got a beautiful PHD2 calibration after I turned off the mount's PEC. This has not been a problem in the past, so I wonder if the PEC file become corrupt while it sat unused this winter. It's going to stay off until I have a chance to retrain the mount.
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I've also learned how to use NINA to acquire images for mosaics, and have set up a file to perform a six-panel mosaic of the Veil Nebula. The first two panels will complete the East Veil.
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