Log, Apr 3, 2009
No people. I often take a nap on Friday afternoon so that I can stay up until midnight at FDO. And even though I very much doubted that I would be going, this is what I did Friday afternoon. It wasn't much of a nap. About twenty minutes into my snooze, there was a brilliant flash and a crack of thunder so soon afterwards that I think the bolt had to have hit within a 1000 feet of the house. The Weather Channel showed a line of red sweeping across Westerly and Charleston. And as soon as the storm subsided, the fog rolled in.Now we have a scale of seeing at FDO where 10 is as perfect as it can be in Rhode Island - rivaling good seeing in the western mountains. 1 means nothing can be seen in the sky. However 1 isn't the lowest value. A value of 0 means you can't see the top of the Dome from inside the Observatory. In truth, the fog we got wasn't quite that bad. We could have seen the top of the Dome if we turned the lights on bright, but we would have had a lousy view of the Nature Center. So I guess we had something like a 0.75 last night.-Les Coleman
