do you guys check the sky at all hours of the night?

Personally, I have a MUCH easier method, sat pics!! If its gonna be clear later I get up early or stay up, if not it's off to zzzzz land.

One day I hope to have the observatory set up in such a way that it will wake up all by itself, open up, do an imaging run and then go back to sleep. Thats still a bit off. Need to get the roof rolling a bit smoother first.

I have the telescopes under robotic control. This means they start off with knowing the condition of the weather. I use a thermopile detector (cloud detector) which determines the clarity of the sky. If the sky is clear, it triggers the building to open and assuming you have a scripted run of targets it will go in to telescope operational mode.

Unfortunately, I have no means yet of determining the wind conditions that would link to a fully exposed telescope which in this case is the bigger one of the two, ie. vibration causing blurry images. I usually go to bed and let the smaller telescope operate for 5/6 hours. Not trusting the observatories still, I let the smaller one operate as it is in a domed observatory. I usually get up may be at 4 or 5 am to make sure everything is still running smoothly. Regarding the bigger telescope I usually go down to a warm room at the back of the observatory.

I am not relishing the day when I will miss been with the telescopes as they become fully robotic. Its been rather a case of "Zen and the art of knowing your telescope" up to now.

Eamonn A

Lads,
I seriously think the whole robotic sensor thing
is more suited to people living in Arizona.

I mean,
a lot of the 'sensor' gear you see peddled in
astromags is along the lines of;
Rain Sensor or Cloud Sensor!

It makes me laugh sometimes,
we do indeed have an 'Irish Denial' thing going on...
Especially when we sell more BBQ's than patioheaters!

I dont normally hit the bed before 5am any night cauz i'm a night owl and i do my best work in the quiet wee hours...............

So as long as i am awake i will always take a look outside every hour to see the conditions.

I seriously think the whole robotic sensor thing
is more suited to people living in Arizona.

...and I seriously disagree

Just the night before last, I surveyed 38 galaxies with the current setup. I could not have done than manually. No way! When I have all the sensors and gizmos in place. I'll be able to get a lot more work done by letting the observatory decide when it's time to open up and get to work. However as Eamonn alluded to, there is the problem of getting so automated you lose track of what the sky looks like. However, I could even now, allow the gear to get on with the imaging and drag the dob off to a dark site and get the best of both worlds.

OMG!! That's scary!!