Hawaii Webcam with thunderstorm sprites

[John Murrell]

I have just seen an interesting link on Spaceweather.com to a webcam mounted outside the CFHT telescope on Hawaii  http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/en/gallery/cloudcams/index.php?opts=still The camera appears to be rather better than the average webcam in terms of sensitivity and quality. The height of over 4000 m helps as well !

 

As well as the live images there are specials which show amongst other things the sprites above a thunderstorm.

 

There are also time lapse movies for every night – probably better to choose new moon as the moon is bright enough to overwhelm the camera.  Surprising the number of cloudy nights even at that altitude ( from a small sample  of recordings).

 

The night sky quality makes me very jealous !

 

Regards

 

John,

[John Mills]

John,

An interesting weather page with good quality movies. The downside being
the horrendous sky glow from Hilo! Would seem there are no 'Sky Laws' on
Hawaii like as on La Palma to minimise light pollution.

Presumably the camera was pointed in that direction and at a low angle
for some specific reason. Perhaps to monitor air traffic at night.
Would be more useful if it was viewing the zenith, but would think there
must be other skycams at Mauna Kea which do that.

There's quite a few skycams at the ORM and some with archived movies.
These can be found at http://catserver.ing.iac.es/weather/ and more
with links made from that page. The GTC skycam is good as are the ones
at the Liverpool telescope. See - http://telescope.livjm.ac.uk/Reports/
The 'A' movies are from the all sky camera mounted within the enclosure
and 'T' being a camera mounted on the telescope with a much narrower FOV.

The weather on LP has been grim for the last few days. Even up at the
ORM. Not able to look for Perseids last night. Heavy cloud with rain
showers at my place. A pity as its a new moon which doesn't often occur
doing this meteor shower :-(

Cheers,

John

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[John Murrell]

Hi John,

Colin Snodgrass of the OU was complaining about the La Palma weather of the Rosetta Perihelion hangout on Google+ a few minutes ago. He had a spectral observation of comet 76P booked for last night at Perihelion and it did not happen due to the weather.

I managed about 10 minutes of observing the Perseids from Carshalton last night before the clouds rolled in. No Perseids seen. Looking at the images I captured a pass by the defunct NOAA 11 satellite at 11:06 BST. It was around mag 4.6 to 5.0 which at least gives me a calibration point for the sensitivity for taking exposures of satellites so not all was lost ;-) Now heavy rain and thunderstorms - great for August !

Regards

John

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[Roy Easto]

A lightning post but really on another strand.

Just back from holiday in Italy. Villa in some mountains. Great storm
broke in early hours with a direct hit on the villa. Lights and power
all went out and the rain came down. Lots more strikes but only one very
close. Very enjoyable as it wasn't my house.

Whilst watching the lightning today at work a colleague showed me this:

http://www.lightningmaps.org/realtime

you can really see the eye of the storm moving with each strike. Not
sure how they triangulate on the strike - audio or radio (I would
imagine the latter).

Regards,

Roy