. With a new and relatively portable mount, the MN56 was able to visit Toa Payoh Park for the first time today.I was joined by Zong Yao and we were there from ~ 10pm - 12:45am.
Jupiter was already visible when we got there, but it was still "boiling" at that time, so we saved it for later.
Toa Payoh Park is slightly darker than where we usually set up, so even though Canis Major and Orion were pretty low (setting), the usual objects like M42 and M41 were nicer to observe here. More stars of M41 were visible, and M42 showed up with much better contrast. On the whole, many more stars were visible in the sky from here too. Oh, and after a few failed attempts at the usual heavily light polluted site, we (finally :roll: ) managed to see the nice triple star system - Beta Monocerotis. We also observed M79 (Globular Cluster in Lepus) briefly. It's rather small, dim and compact, so we didn't spend too much time on it.
Once we were done in the West, we went back to Jupiter in the East. The image we got was much better now as compared to nearly 1.5 hrs ago. The image looked more whitish than yellowish now, and more surface detail (not just the usual bands !) was observed. We also spent some time observing one of the moons as it slowly moved out from the back of the planet. Nice
We were hoping to catch a transit of one of the moons because one of them did appear like it would be passing in front of the planet anytime and casting that interesting, spot-like shadow on the planet - but sadly, that didn't happen tonight.
The Southern skies were rather bare, and as we approached midnight, we could see the rising false cross. Once I saw it, I remembered I had an old friend in the area so I decided to pay it a visit. NGC 2808 (Globular Cluster in Carina). Despite being an NGC object, this Globular Cluster is easily observed. It's larger and brighter than M79. You guys should check it out too. After NGC 2808, we decided to look for some Open Clusters in the area. Most of them were NGC's and some were quite disappointing as they were either very dim or relatively bright but scattered. Of all those observed, only one is worthy of mentioning : NGC 2516 (Open Cluster in Carina). I've never tried this object before, so at first, I thought this was going to be "just another boring and hard to make out cluster", but I peered into the eyepiece and - "Wow". This cluster is not bad. Quite rich. Something like M41. I later learnt that (if you have a dark sky) this cluster is actually a naked eye object
.Though we ended the session with a humble object count (the easier and usual M's , and a handful of NGC GCs and OCs), perhaps it's interesting to note that we were just about 300m away from our usual site today. This should give you an idea of how terrible our usual site was for deep sky observing ! Other than the brighter planets, Moon and the brightest deep sky objects, nothing else is really worth the effort over there. Hm, so with that in mind, we did have quite a good catch today afterall
Nite all.