Thursday, 12 August 2021, was cloudy with more rain (0.06"). Friday, 13 August, was mostly cloudy. This impressive storm was visible to the south of Oracle at 1802 MST.

Had more rain (0..4") Saturday morning, 14 August. During a heavy rain shower in the afternoon this Harris's Hawk came in for a landing.

The afternoon storm dropped an additional 1.8" rain in 45 minutes. I called in my Weather Spotter report to the Tucson National Weather Service office and a couple of minutes later they issued a Flash Flood Warning emergency message for Oracle, an alert on Twitter, and an announcement on their web site.

Total rain for Saturday was 2.57". Sunday, 15 August, was mostly cloudy.

Monday, 16 August, began mostly clear, but cumulus clouds began appearing mid-morning, with a severe thunderstorm mid-day with heavy rain (1" in one hour), lightning, and dime-sized hail (occasional nickel-sized). Late Monday night I woke up to see frequent lightning flashes but heard no thunder. I went back to sleep. My webcams captured some of the lightning that occurred from the storm that continued into early Tuesday morning, 17 August. Received only 0.01" rain here from this storm.

Thursday, 18 August, was cloudy with some rain during the early morning (0.01").

18 August 2021 is the 12th anniversary of "First Light" at Cassiopeia Observatory. Here is a video of "The Making of Cassiopeia Observatory" that I created in 2011.

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If you have upgraded to Firefox 91 on your Macintosh, you probably have noticed that the Cassiopeia Observatory site looks different. Mozilla broke something in the latest Firefox version and it now ignores background colors in my CSS code. The same problem occurs on many other sites, including commercial ones. Other web browsers still work OK on my site and these other sites. A (hopefully) temporary fix for Firefox is to turn off "Increase contrast" in macOS System Preferences: Accessibility: Display. (Thanks to Ken for finding this fix.)

The "TOPGREENER Plug-In Digital Light Timer" that I purchased in June 2018 to control the observatory air conditioner had become erratic. It would reliably turn the Air Conditioner ON per the programmed schedule, but would randomly turn it OFF after a couple of hours, ignoring the OFF time that had been programmed. I did a "factory reset" on the timer, but the problem continued. I replaced it with a spare I had purchased at the same time, and it has worked perfectly.

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