The weather plays the most significant role in deciding if our observatories are opened or closed each evening. The LightBuckets observatories are situated in locations that are known for their dark skies, excellent seeing, good transparency, and terrific weather. Each summer, however, the desert southwest (where 3 of our telescopes are located) experiences a two to three month period called monsoon season. Many think a monsoon is an individual storm, it is not. In fact, it's a large scale weather pattern that persists for some period of time. It also doesn't have a well defined start and end date, it's rather fuzzy. For the southwestern United States, the monsoon season "officially" begins when the average daily dew point is above 54 degrees for three consecutive days. Take a look at the relative humidity on the chart below (the dark blue line) that comes from our weather station in Rodeo, NM.



You can see that the relative humidity is well above 60% and in the 80-90% range for much of the evening. During non-monsoon times, our relative humidity is generally less than 15% and often times under 10%.

From now until late August or early September, we will have almost daily thunderstorm activity at both our Rodeo (LB-0001 and LB-0003) and Mayhill (LB-0005) sites. Sometimes the thunderstorms will clear out for the evening, sometimes they'll go right through the night. There will most likely be a back log of runs for our observatories to do (like there is right now) so it could take longer to get your data during this period. If you are able or want to image the southern sky, these couple of months are a great time to do it. The telescope in Pingelly, Western Australia is a terrific piece of equipment with a 14.5" mirror that is ion milled to provide even higher contrast images.

I have recently added a couple of movies to my gallery showing a monsoon storm rolling in. You can view them here and here.

We apologize in advance if your imaging runs take longer than expected. We will do everything we can to get your run into one of our observatories as soon as possible.

If all this monsoon talk sounds bleak, I'd like to remind you (and myself!) that our Rodeo, NM and Mayhill, NM locations get 287 sunny days and 282 sunny days per year respectively. Rodeo only gets about 11 inches of rain per year while Mayhill receives about 18 inches per year. Mayhill also gets about 17 inches of snow per year...Rodeo usually gets none. Both well under the national average.

If you would like to read more about the southwestern U.S. monsoons, there is plenty of information at the NOAA website at:

http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/twc/monsoon/monsoon_NA.php
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/twc/monsoon/monsoon_progression.php.