The first 2-plus hours of the night were overcast. Then, another surprise clearing of the sky just before midnight allowed nearly 4 hours of observing to finish the final observing campaign for Cycle 2 of the Fermi mission. Skies were often good, but not photometric, with occasional clouds hindering progress. The seeing was generally very poor, varying between 1.5-4.0 arcsec.
Though not a shutout, the Arizona monsoon won this week overall. Only about a third of the amount of data collected in past campaigns were obtained during this week. A tactical retreat from the mountain will be made tomorrow and this will close out scheduled observing for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope mission for Cycle 2. In total, there were 80 nights during the cycle (year) in which optical observations were made.
Enjoy the rest of the summer. We'll return in 2010 September to start optical support of Fermi in Cycle 3.
