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(meteorobs) Re: Florida observing inadvisable
A spreading outbreak of St. Louis encephalitis is going to make observing
around peninsular Florida not a good idea for a few weeks. Every two weeks
a group of sentry chickens are tested for the disease. They are kept at a
number of confidential locations so mosquitoes can bite them. Three
chickens in Lee County here just tested positive in three separate spots.
Palm Beach already had some a month ago. Orlando has a full-scale alert for
encephalitis -- all evening activity has to be rescheduled for daylight
hours when the mosquitoes are much less active. Football games are being
played on Saturday morning there instead of Friday night. It got that bad
around Fort Myers in 1990. So I can't go to the dark-sky site for meteors
until maybe late October.
What I could do is some city observing from the rooftop a few times. Limit
will be around 5.5 t o 5.8. I could use some more bright-sky data to refine
my sky correction factors. But the neighbor just put up a new light in
response to druggies going at it behind the apartment building to our rear.
That will limit my direction to NW. Mosquitoes usually stay within a few
feet of the ground, so I will be safe on the roof.
To get anything done, clear skies are needed. There is a possible
developing tropical storm below Cuba, throwing clouds over us already the
past two days. We could use a soaking rain, ten inches or so, to get ready
for the dry season. But that does wonders for mosquitoes also.
From Jonathan:
>
>Is this Bill Gates the same one that is over Microsoft?
>
>Jonathan
Negative. Bill the meteor observer was active 1968-81, after which he
disappeared. He loathed joining the working world of sadness and drudgery
in 1978, as he put it. So he went back to school and got a simple job to
keep himself active. Nobody knows how long he kept that up. This Bill
would not have had the ambition to begin a giant new corporation.
Norman