Searching for a patch of clear western sky, for Panstarrs

Around 5pm some clear skies, basically a hole in the clouds opened up over Lincoln Park. I decided to see if the channel seven Doppler radar site showed any opening in the clouds, or trends. I also looked at some other weather sites, some thin openings might be appearing but the sky looked like it would be fairly cloudy.

I decided to try to see if the clouds would be clearing toward Ann Arbir and Dexter Michigan. About an hour before sunset, 7:30pm today with eastern standard time, I started driving toward Ann Arbor.

The sky and cloud patterns didn't look good. Low and high clouds were in the sky, meaning one would have to find a clearing in both layers. Very unlikely.




Photo above near i275 and I-94 shows the multiple cloud layers.

Ahead the sky looked clear but only in a thin area and it had other clouds up higher. The sun would perhaps peek through, but I don't think we'd see a planet or comet through that.




Continuing toward a break in the clouds.

I finally arrived in Dexter Michigan. In an area near downtown Dexter you can see the tree line and western sky with maybe six degrees from true horizon to the top of most of the tree line. (my three fingers at arms length representing six degrees, which are on the left side of the photo below.)

It looks like at ten degrees above the horizon maybe in a day or two the comet might be visible from this location, if the sky cooperated, but this is far from the ideal site with a somewhat obscured western horizon.





That's it for now. The weather not good enough to announce a comet watching event around here.

I'm looking forward to actually seeing comet Panstarrs photos from the USA.



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