I was out this early this morning observing Jupiter - while it does
rise at about midnight it's too low in the sky to make it a late
night target at the moment. As it started to come light I took my
eye away from the EP and just looked at it naked eye.

I noticed the whole general area was littered with three roughly
parallel contrails that snaked right across the sky - they may
well have been responsible for some periods of particularly poor
seeing I had experienced. I looked around the sky and counted at
least 12 contrails of varying size scattered about.

I recall reading an article a while back saying that telescopes
may become useless in future decades because of them [1] but I
didn't believe it at the time. Now I'm starting to wonder. Since
the nearest major airport is 40 miles away I would imagine I'm in
far from the worst place in this regard. What is everyone else's
experience? Could this really turn into a new problem on a similar
scale to light pollution?

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4755996.stm

--
Andrew Smallshaw