Your longest photographic "dry spell"?

I know how you feel. it's been months since I had proper a good night, with good seeing conditions and hours upon hours of cloudless skies.
Most nights have been… meh.. usually some clouds around.. or hazy.. or only 2-3 hours worth of clear sky.. usually when the full moon is out to ruin things.
This meant some of my projects are worked on for months and months. collecting 2-3 hours of data when I can. As annoying as that is…as, like you. I prefer getting 15+ hours on projects.

It doesn't help that my layout at home limits my shooting to begin with. Great views south/west. Crap views north/east. And Kinda crap views straight up too. (Part of my balcony is covered by a roof. So I tend to shoot at 45 degrees or lower to begin with), So at the moment it has been 2 months since my last nebula photography (sounds like we're in an AA meeting :happy-1

What I have done though to help a little, is to diversify my astrophotography.
- Bought a cheap solar scope, and occasionally I do some solar imaging. you don't need hours of clear sky for that!
- Same for planetary. A newtonian or maksutov scope and my guide camera, make for an "ok"-ish planetary rig. A hole in the clouds of an hour is more than enough for that.
- reprocessing older data.

Obviously I'd prefer to setup my rigs 8 hours worth of nebula or galaxy data in one night.. and I can't wait for that.. 
But, I'm doing my best to get my astrophotography fixes in other ways.

Hello my name is Scott and I'm an astroholic…..

Thanks Marc for suddenly making me feel lucky with my one night a week on average! Of course, it's always a Sunday night since Monday is my earliest morning for work…..

The hardest thing is going to bed on a cloudy night assuming no prospect, waking up at midnight or after and seeing stars through the window, and then the mental struggle over going back to bed vs. getting up, getting dressed, and setting up…..

Cheers,
Scott

This has become the norm down here, Chile, latitude 35 south, all nights either cloudy or with dense fog, sometimes it seems fine, and you set up everything, and after an hour you listen the PHD2  guiding alarm that guiding stars were lost…you look up and…it is all white of fog !, so collecting short time exposures has been quite normal now…but is not the idea …even that those shorts windows are with not good seeing.

The idea is to set up your scope in a "dark, dry and high" place.  Not many of us are able to do that.  I live at only 500' MSL under fierce summer heat and high humidity.  Bortle 7.  This has also been a cloudy summer.
But the worst thing is the smoke!  Fires in the US western states have pumped high altitude, transparency killing smoke across the entire continent.

I continue to strongly consider remote imaging, setting up my own equipment on someone's permanent pier.  Sadly this is a very expensive thing to do, and the bills for carrying it alone are high.  I have tried to find partners, but no one seems interested, which took me by surprise.

This is a tough and expensive hobby in many ways.

I sympathies with all of you the same, I took time off for medical reasons. When I was able to go at it again, I purchased a new mount and scope two years ago. Since then were I live they built four massive warehouses with LED lights every were. Now they replaced all the street lights with nice and bright LED street lights on my street. 

I have to say that, I am one of the few lucky ones that will be able to move to a high and dry location under a Bortle 1 sky.

This is peanuts and crackers compared to what has been mentioned above but I haven't been able to do any deep space imaging for probably two months due to fire smoke. This week was actually clear or smoke, and the conditions were pretty great. Too bad I was working. Now that it is the weekend and I could do something, the smoke is back. Awesome. It will be unlikely that I point a telescope at the sky for imaging purposes until late September or October now.

I am still debating driving out tonight but if I do that I think I might just slew around and do some visual stuff.

Knowing my luck, the smoke will follow me as I drive east for university



Fun fact: Astrobin tracks your integration time by month! Kind of funny that I banged out most of my time when I was a bright eyed newbie in January. Now that I kind of know what I am doing I can't get any data to save my life.

Thanks for all the input, glad to hear I am not the only one with this issue. Although it seems I hold the unfortunate distinction of having been cursed with bad weather for a whole year

I actually did think about getting into remote imaging - considering the cost of having ones astro kit rotting away in the shed, having a remote setup doesn't seem too bad. 

Sadly for me, the process of capturing data is half of what makes the hobby fun, so just downloading images from a remote server isn't really an option. So here is hoping for better weather…

Three months of every night that's clear all night is terrible seeing, like can't even plate-solve the stars are so bloated (not that it matters since any data would be unusable anyhow), and every night that starts clear with decent seeing, I think my best has been an hour and a half before the clouds show up…… It's been a long winter so far playing Charlie Brown to the sky gods Lucy and her football……

Cheers,
Scott

Same here.  Last image (project) was done in October.  Had the beginnings of a clear night this week that only last an hour.  Pretty frustrating to set up two rigs only to break it down an hour later.  I had a good run in the spring and summer (no smoke thankfully) but paying the price now.  Still waiting to do ngc 1333, m78, m42 and dolphin head.  Not sure I will get any of them done at this rate.  Oh and never mind the comet lol.

Since my remote site is near Monterey in California, it is better called a "wet spell"

As the slogan says, I live on the sunny side of the Alps. Ha! It's been two months and 4 days since the skies were last clear. Weather patterns sure have changed a lot! Like Daywalker, I am keeping a diary this year to count all clear nights. My 2022 year astro diary shows 32 sessions and not a single night was completely clear! I hardly missed a clear night, so, maybe there were  40 *partially* clear nights in the whole year!? Sunny side of the Alps indeed!