Weather information

The IAC now provides water vapour data. These measurements are obtaining with the help of the GPS network using specialised software. Water vapour measurements are especially useful for IR observations and the latest results is now presented on our weather page. Also the seeing measurements form the TNG DIMM were added (plotted together with the ING RoboDIMM data).

Recently a fish-eye all-sky camera (SkyCam) was installed at GranTeCan, providing an image of the sky day and night. Especially the night view can be very useful when observing to check for clouds and a link to the images from this camera was provided on the weather page. The possibility to see a movie of the data from the current night or previous nights was added. We also provide the option to download these movies.

We also provide an overlay with an AltAz coordinate grid on the SkyCam image, on which internal to the NOT network we also indicate the present pointing of the telescope. We are planning to replace this with a grid indicating Hour Angle and Declination. A collaboration has also been setup with GTC to look into developing software that will turn SkyCam into an extension mapper and cloud detector.