Thomas and I arrived at the place just before the moon rose. the place is just pass that barrier. it was locked on hence prevented easy access, not impossible. that stretch of road, there are no street lamps. but due to light pollution from the Turf Club, the place wasnt too dark.the road in is like 400m or more. and fully paved. tall grass, about 1.5 m tall, on both sides and trees around the area, but not blocking most of the horizon view, but they do provide good cover from Turf Club's lights.
even at the barrier, we could start to see the teapot and scorpious! as we walked further in, more n more stars start to be visible! we speculated that if turf club turned off their lights, we might even get to see the milky way.. the place was really good to view stars. this is like one of the most stars i have seen in the past 10 years of my life, and i thought sg could not see so much stars since it was pretty light polluted. after scouting the place and found a proper place to setup, we went back to collect the gears.
as we unloaded, Thomas spotted a huge orange disk slowly creeping out of the horizon. the moon is out. to make the best of what little time we have before the moon outshine all the other stars, we had to move fast. Alex's car then drove in and we started to move all our barang in. setting up the 8" on the dob was pretty easy, but Alex's 4" Vixen doublet refractor on the a vixen SXD mount is another issue. we had to mount it with a half pier then balance the scope.
i just got a new 42mm 2" EP from Ian at 7pm and promptly put it to use on the 8" Newt. the wide views were stunning! a very good investment.. and i pray i wont go 2" EP only from here on... it is a very different experience having such wide view on the m7 cluster. which was so easy to spot it was visible to the naked eye.. on the other hand, Alex is having trouble with his new scope. it was yet to be deployed before. placing a 20mm into the focuser, without a diagonal, we cant even focus the scope on anything. switching to a 40mm EP, we can finally focus on the moon, but with the focuser fully extended. then with Thomas' diagonal, things were a little better, but still a 20mm cant focus! we tried with Thomas' DSLR camera and it had the same effect as the 40mm. we have no idea why this was the case and we only understood that an extender is required. then i remembered that a 2x barlow not so much as half the EP's focal length, but more of doubling the focal length of the OTA, Thomas passed me his 2X barlow, which has a detachable base, to which was detached to make the barlow 1.5x. this in turn resolved the issue, somewhat. more answers are required, why cant the scope work without a barlow?
about 2 plus, clouds started to gathered and we called it a day. Thank you, Thomas, for sending me all the way back to Tampines!
conclusion.
pro
- the place is a good place to obs.
- paved road, not grass
- when the moon was near zenith, what the sky has to offer is about the same bishan on a moonless night
- Need own transport to access
- near a reservoir everything just dew up
- mozzies are plenty. mozzie patch almost dont work. even have mozzie coils lit up
