Seeing & Weather

Usually Neot Smadar has clear skies most of the year. About 20 nights per year are cloudy and in spring time the region can be affected by dust storms.

Compared to other observatory sites, the night sky in Neot Smadar is not very dark and we measured a V-band sky brightness of 20.9 mag arcsec^-2.

The astronomical seeing on the other hand is excellent. In a year-long campaign we measured a very low seeing of only 1.3 arcsec on average using a Cyclope seeing monitor. This is smaller than the instrumental seeing which is about 2 arcsec for most LAST telescopes. Therefore, the image quality of the LAST survey is limited by the quality and alignments of the optics in most nights and not by the blurring of the atmosphere.