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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

After months of clear blue skies and well over 100 degree temps, it just started raining with forecast predicting a week of cloudy potential rain with a much need serious break in temps. On the weekend of a comet!! I swear the universe just doesn’t want me to see anything! Argh!!!

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https://theoatmeal.com/comics/celestial_events

Yeah. There’s many a version of this, but I don’t need a comic, it’s the story of every stargazer

When I have the time off, the weather is shite. When I’m busy, the weather is clear. When a new moon lands on a weekend and I rent gear to take advantage,you guessed it…

There's a common in-joke among telescope owners that purchasing a new telescope gets you a month of free "cloud service".

Every year my family goes to watch the Perseids in the desert, a drive of a few hours. This year, not one but two other families joined us... and this was the first year ever that we had clouds in our remote viewing spot. It was so cloudy that after ten o'clock we saw not a single meteor, and most of us stayed up until three to catch whatever we could, despite having work the next day.

Doesn't that happen everytime you want to show something?

I've heard it referred to as the Curse of the Demo. Now available on VHS with HiFi!

As always, us Germans have a great word for that: Der Vorführeffekt. Curse of the Demo is the closest English equivalent I came across so far.

Rain killed any chance of seeing the Blue Moon for be. But the universe was nice, the clear skies meant four days straight of a clear view on the milky way, while I was lucky enough to be at place close to no light polution!

We'll see what this night brings, should be around 4-5 in the morning in my neck of the woods!

Nothing better than sitting out a rain storm, and taking advantage of the clean air immediately behind it. Some of my best images came this way.

So true! There was quite a lot of dust in the air over the alps lately, smoke from Canadian wildfires apparently. For the blue moony it was no storm so... Just light rain and solid cloud cover large enough to not even bother driving elsewhere. The day after I got the moon and Venus (I guess), didn't check yet on the computer but so far those pics seem to be good enough!

Yeah, the day before/after full moon is still a really really full/bright moon that nobody other than someone checking the timestamps of the image would know it was the day of the full moon. Plus, a lot of times, the instant of the full moon is usually in the day time for me, so technically by the time the moon comes up it is already waning. I've been to places that the night of the full moon is crowded with photographers, but the night before/after leaves me there all alone.

I like the first days after a full moon, the shadows where the moon goes dark are just great around the craters. Much more definition than on a full moon, IMHO.

That the Blue Moon hid behind clouds is nothing I miss, after all it would just have been for the "saw it, took a photo" bucket. If those milky way shots woild have been impossible, that would have been worse!

Isn't that the fun so, woeking aroind weather outdoors? So much around us is olanned and scheduled, it is nice every once in a while to have natural ransomness in live.

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