I followed RLow and his wife up there on Sat. Along the way there, some fog and mist was observed near hill tops in the Kahang region, so we knew that conditions would likely be moist. It was quite cloudy when we arrived at the farm at around 8.30pm, but this mostly cleared up by around 9.30pm.
RLow deployed his 11" Dob, and I set up a 100mm-45deg bino on a Vixen fork mount and the Manfrotto 475 tripod which I had just acquired from Weixing.
Large regions of the sky were clear till we finished at around 1.30am. However, we were beset by quite a lot of dew, which was largely absent the first two times I was there. Nevertheless, we did managed to observe several DSOs. RLow and his wife saw a whopper of a meteor, which I missed!
We went to sleep at around 2am in the farm accommodation rooms. Later, I got up at around 5.15am. When I got outside, I was astonished to see the Milky Way stretch high up and across the whole sky from the WSW to the North. The patches of cloudy milk and the dust lanes in the northern Milky Way were sharp, clear and high in contrast. The sky was crystal clear and the stars were countless, esp in the region around Cygnus. It was as good a view as I’ve seen anywhere else, including our usual site at Telok Sari (Mersing) and in Australia during the South Pacific Star Party at their Wiruna location. It was a breathtaking sight.
This was the my 3rd time at Kahang, and just as with my 2nd time there, the sky was crystal clear (in terms of clarity) after 3am.
RLow and I scanned the northeast just before 6am to look out for the comet (Mc Naught C/2009 R1). We think we managed to spot it through small binos low in the sky just before the sky started to brighten.
We also saw something unusual which I had never seen before. Just before the crack of dawn, a thin but distinct triangular beam of white light was seen in the northeast. It came straight out of the horizon and extended for about 20 degrees. It lasted for about 2-3 mins. Richard told me it is a natural phenomenon which he had seen before, called the zodiacal light: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiacal_light
It looked very much like this photo on Wikipedia, though it seems that this photo was taken with a telephoto lens: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Zodia ... aranal.jpg
Below are some photos of the Milky Way and general star fields which I took. All are single shots with simple post-processing done: light levels adjusted; and colour levels adjusted (mostly red turned down; blue and yellow increased for more punch).
Shot details:
Photo 1: 30-second exposure of sky above the farm’s pond. Camera placed on a chair for support. Canon EOS 350D dSLR, Sigma 17-70mm lens at 17mm, f/2.8, ISO 1600. The bright star in the centre is Vega.
Photo 2: 30-second exposure of northern Milky Way in the Summer Triangle / Cygnus area. Camera placed on a chair for support and propped to point upwards. Canon EOS 350D dSLR, Sigma 17-70mm lens at 17mm, f/2.8, ISO 1600. Deneb is at right, Vega at bottom, and Altair at upper left.
Photo 3: 180-second exposure of central Milky Way region. Camera mounted on an Astrotrac and a tripod. Canon EOS 350D dSLR, Sigma 17-70mm lens at 17mm, f/2.8, ISO 1600. (I had taken other shots with longer duration and lower ISOs and at f/3.5 and f/4; however, there was some star trailing in those photos as I did not do drift alignment).
![[smilie=good-job.gif]](./images/smilies/good-job.gif "good-job")
"The universe is composed mainly of hydrogen and ignorance." 
