The night I got 14 sharp moon shots then lost everything to a single cloud bank

Last Saturday I was out at the Overlook Trail in Vermont, nailing Jupiter's bands and the lunar terminator for a solid 4 hours. Then at 2 AM a thick fog rolled in from the valley and ruined every single frame I took after midnight. It was the best imaging session I'd had in months, but also the most frustrating because I went home with mostly unusable data. Has anyone else had a perfect night completely destroyed by weather right at the peak of it?

3 comments

3 Comments

robins8318d ago

Oh man, that hurts to read. I had something similar happen last winter with the Orion Nebula. I was getting these crisp stacks, thought I had the perfect alignment going. Then out of nowhere this high, thin layer of cirrus just drifted in. Couldn't see it with my eye. But my subs started going all soft and fuzzy. I kept checking my focus thinking I bumped the mount. Took me a good 20 minutes to realize it was the clouds. By then the best part of the night was gone and I just packed it up. Ended up with maybe 30 percent of my data being good. Its like the sky knows when you're onto something special and just messes with you.

the_elliot18d ago

30 percent? That's honestly better than what I would have expected from a night like that. Those invisible cirrus clouds are the worst because you don't even know you're fighting them until you look at your stack later. I've lost entire nights to that same thing, thinking my guiding was off or my collimation had shifted in the cold. It's frustrating because you can't really fight it, you just have to watch your good data turn to mush in real time. You did the right thing packing it up when you did, there's no point chasing bad conditions.

olivia_moore18d ago

Doesn't it feel like the atmosphere just has it out for astrophotographers sometimes? I swear the moment you get a perfect polar alignment and start pulling in that sweet, sweet data, the clouds just materialize out of nowhere like they were waiting for you. It's honestly wild how a night can go from 10/10 to completely trashed in the span of like 15 minutes.