As requested by David, I shall write an observation report for Friday’s night at tuas.
Since it was predicted that the moon would be out somewhere near midnight, David quickly mobilize all of us so that we can make use of as much of the night as possible.
Reach the usual tuas obsite at around 10pm. at that time the skies is still slightly cloudy. Among some of the star that I could make out with naked eyes during the entire session is epsilon lyrae, roughly mag 4.56; I believe that there are prolly some even dimmer stars that could be seen. This, I consider it to be pretty good for star gazing, your not expecting mag 6-7 skies in sg right?
David’s car was completely filled up by me, Richard (not "Airconvent", the other Richard) and his 2 daughters. Among the equipment present were 3 pairs of binos and a c8.
During the night, most of my observation is done on binos, since my scope is not present. Many of the objects which I have in the past found with my 3" toy were easily seen thru the binos. List of objects I have taken down with my binos include m4, m6, m7, m8, m20, m21, m80, m13, ngc 4755, ngc 5139, ngc 6231, m104. Most interesting was m104 at Corvus, otherwise known as sombrero galaxy. It’s suppose to be mag 9.5, but easily seen in the binos as a faint smudge.
During the night, Richard was our human goto. He easily picked out some of the harder objects with the c8. He would find the objects for us and we took turn to enjoy the views of the objects. Some of the more interesting objects that we visit during the night with the c8 include m57, m11, m4, m104, ngc 5139. This is prolly the first time I have seen the wild duck. Slighty washed out by the moon light, but still it was an amazing cluster with lots of stars pack together. I bet it would be a lot more spectacular if the moon wasn’t there.
Chris joined us later in the night with his 8” canon. As usual, his scope could be up in less than 1min, since setting up would only involve putting the scope onto the base, then putting in the eyepiece and finder. I peep at the common objects with his scope. Views are pretty good, since we are talking about a whopping 8” of aperture. Stuff like omega centauri could easily resolve into thousands of stars. Ring neb at slightly higher powers show a nice o shaped smoke ring. The larger clusters like m7 could be shown properly due to its ability to handle wider field objects. The last object for the night was moon, at rather high powers thru his dob. Many of the detail on the moon could be seen clearly. Guess I have not been doing much observation on the moon for quite some time.
At around 2am, we packed up and left the obsite, since the moon has already killed off most of the nice objects near sagi.
