Kahang - brief trip report

[Clifford60]

Hi Gavin, very well taken pictures especially you are only using Astrotrac, I guess the first 2 you don't have to use it, right? PP for Milky Way, I feel it is a bit too hard, a bit unnatural, somewhere between the earlier and the latest will be better.

Anyway, thank you for sharing.

[Gary]

Good stuff! Thanks for sharing! Are you planning to go there again?

[mymoon]

I had taken dozens of 30s exposures hoping to catch a meteor, but so far I've not been able to find any captures of the meteors in the photos. William told me most meteors are too faint to be captured in the fleeting moment of their flight.

Well you would first need a f2.8 L lens and take many shots

Then you would need lots of luck.

William can confirm whether it was with or without him there.


Canon EOS 40DHutech 20s f/2.8 at 16.0mm iso800

Keep trying.

cheers

[shirox]

nice photos

[starfinder]

Hi Clifford, yes the two other photos didnt require tracking. I'll continue to try improving the adjustments on the Milky Way photo. The difficulty is trying to maintain or bring out the contrast of the Milky Way in the upper left (northern arm) whilst not making the central bulge too bright or harsh.

Hi Rich, yup, this is like the good old days of many reports! Hope there'll be plenty more.

Hi Gary, I'm not sure when I'll be going up to Johor next. Made 3 overnight trips already this year.

Hi Mymoon, yup, William told me that he saw Geminids in the past few years. For us in S'pore/Johor, December is a difficult month due to the monsoon season.

I did not photograph the fireball which I wrote about (the one near Cygnus which was as bright, or almost as bright, as Venus) since my lens was then pointing at another direction (around Aquarius).

I used an intervalometer to keep taking 30s exposures, with a 10s pause in between to let the CCD cool down a bit and to allow time to check on the settings/exposures, wipe off dew (it was just slight, with a heat pack on), etc.

[universe24]

Hi Singastro!
It been long time that I didn't post any astrophoto here...

Here are some snap shots from a modded 40D (loan from friend).
Most of the picture taken at ISO800, 20~30 sec.
Nikon 18-35mm, f/3.5 lens.











Below are taken during outreach session. We setup the CPC800 and pointed to Saturn early that night but they are busy with their own activities.

But we manage to catch attention of the teachers and they ask wether can let their students to have a look at the night sky through the telescope or not. But then the Saturn almost set and not nice to be view.

Then we pointed the CPC800 to albireo which is a very nice and colourful double star. I love to observe this double star system as we can see the one star in reddish orange and another in light blue.











This is the only partially deep sky object image that captured in this trip.

[cataclysm]

Wow! Nice images, looks like the farm is busy with activities.

[starfinder]

Nice photos William!


BTW, I discovered this Japanese web resource today whereby one can access archives of satellite weather photos going back many years. I think it's mainly that of east Asia:
http://weather.is.kochi-u.ac.jp/sat/gms.sea/
The main page of indexes and explanations is here:
http://weather.is.kochi-u.ac.jp/archive-e.html


For example, here is an IR image of the cloud cover during our Mersing / Sedili / Kahang astro expeditions last Sat at 10pm (30 July 2011 at 1400 UTC). It shows that most of Johor was clear (at least of the large clouds):

[cloud_cover]

Nice! Thanks for the tip!

[rcj]

very nice photos, Gavin and Wei-Loon! Looks like ya guys had some fair weather over at Kahang as well!