My short session 8/9/04

[MooEy]

hmm.. had another short session at 9pm. Found a playground near my house, sat on the playground and set up my 3" toy scope.

Badly light polluted site but that's the best i could get, unobstructed southern skies. i could read my book with the lights from the playground.

skies was rather clear tonight, little clouds near the zenith, but near the horizon u could see red colour stuff. lots of clouds.

went for the easier stuff first. m7 was found, at 24x i had stars all over the field.

m6 was pleasing too, instead of just seeing the main stars, i could see the dimmer and smaller stars in it. guess lesser clouds is important.

ngc 6231 was rather low already, near the horizon, not really nice to see. too much clouds covering the object.

during this part, a kid came along and asked if he could take a look. i agreed and show him m7. after that, a bunch of kids(abt 10+ of them) ran towards me and all wanted to see. they started to molest my scope. one of them even poke his fingers into my tv20mm!!! moral of story, never entertain bunch of unsupervised kids.

moved towards delta scorpius. hmm.. never knew it was a double. cleanly splited with 7.5mm eyepiece. tried to located m80, failed. m4 was a failure too.

went towards sagi. wanted to find m25 at first, ended up with m22 as i went wrong direction. nice little fuzzy ball.

went for the usual m8 again, some nebulosity could be seen, the star cluster was quite obvious.

went back to cap of teapot to try m28, found without much difficulty. smaller than m22, quite dim. but could make out using direct vision.

decided to try new stuff, went to bottom of the teapot, spoted m54 immediately even though it's suppose to be mag 8.5. extremely small globular cluster, even in the 7.5mm it's still veri small.

wanted to find m70 and m69, but couldn't locate due to being inexperience. maybe someone could help. better skies would do too.

~MooEy~

[zong]

Hey.. I had my own experience tonight too! Without any aid, though, because it was last minute. I went to East Coast Park for a party, and just happened to see scorpius and sagitarius. Wow, I didn't realise the sky was that much better at East Coast. Seeing even the bare constellation is a thrill for me after a month of looking at books and questions (and surfing.. haha).

[Airconvent]

hmm.. had another short session at 9pm. Found a playground near my house, sat on the playground and set up my 3" toy scope.
~MooEy~

hi mooey,
looks like you had a relatively good attempt tonight. you should have tried albireo. its quite a nice double colour pair....

[Airconvent]

Hey.. I had my own experience tonight too! Without any aid, though, because it was last minute. I went to East Coast Park for a party, and just happened to see scorpius and sagitarius. Wow, I didn't realise the sky was that much better at East Coast. Seeing even the bare constellation is a thrill for me after a month of looking at books and questions (and surfing.. haha).

hi zong.
I remembered my first time checking out the constellations as well. a very exciting moments as you begin to identify them one by one.
this is a good start. once you get a feel of the main stars and structure, going to mersing to see them will be another ball game together. as there are so many stars to be seen sometimes its difficult to make out the constellation there!

rich

[weixing]

Hi,
Last night went to the Changi site for a short observation session too... thanks to clement and wei kang for picking me up in Tampines

We start our observation at around 21:30 and the sky was very very clear. Too bad, I forget to bring my TelRad Reflex Sight... As a result, I have some problem pointing to the first star when doing star hopping...

Anyway, my objective was to find the M11... the Wild Duck Cluster which I always forget to observe during all my previous observation session. I point the scope at the sagittarius and scorpius region and start scanning for familiar object using my Right-Angle Finder, since I forget to bring my TelRad Reflex Sight. Suddenly a very bright globular cluster came into view of the finder scope.... it M22... standing out from the sky. From there, I hopped to M8, M24, M16 and finally following a few of stars to M11. WOW! What a sight :!: :!: :!: The cluster was very bright 8) and very beautiful . Highly Recommended!!

After viewing the M11, I point my scope at M31... not as impressive as it look in Mersing, but still quite good... hard to imagine that the light is from some 2 million light years away... ha ha. After M31, we turn our scope at the double cluster and M45. The double cluster was not so impressive... :? , but may due to the fact that it was just too low and so affected by the atmosphere. The M45 was better... can see the whole cluster in my FOV!! We end our observation at around 00:30 after admire M45 for a while.

Also, I compare the TeleVue Nagler with my Pentax XL eyepiece... both are top class eyepiece and really can't complaint about the image quality, but I found out that the TeleVue Nagler eyepiece seem to be more "friendly" towards the UHC filter! When the UHC filter is on my Pentax XL eyepiece, the lens of the eyepiece become very reflective... so if the site is not so dark, you can easily see your own eye. But that doesn't seem to happen to the TeleVue Nagler... :?:

Oh! Forget to mention that we also see 4 very impressive objects yesterday night... 4 F-16 :?: taking off and landing in front of us... may be less than 800m away with Full Afterburner... :!: What a Sight and the noise they make were just WOW!!!

Have a nice day.

[Airconvent]

hi weixing,
you had a very good night but how come Sat nights not like this???

[kingkong]

glad to see so many people enjoyed the same clear night. where i am, it's like the first clear night in the past 2 months. even from my backyard, the milkyway was clearly visible between sagittarius and scorpius, it can even vaguely be seen running toward cygnus. limiting magnitude was better than 4.6 - i could make out E-Lyra (4.6) with naked eyes before dark adapt.
i did a quick surf around the rich starfields of the milkyway, mostly ultra-wide field - 40mm on my ST 102mm! before the cloud came in to obscure sagi - then i moved to the northern cross region but frustrated for unable to pickup any of the nebulacity around that region - i need my sn8 now! and need to build a proper light shield to keep my neighbour's stray lightings from spoiling my night vision... need to make an adjustable stool... need more clear nights on weekends...
need to rant less... :oops:

[hlyf]

whoa cool, can see milky way from backyard hmm i got up early to observe a couple of days ago too, and took a bunch of photos of moon/saturn/orion neb with my digicam.. will try stacking and see if i can get any nice image out when i'm free first time astrophotog, no good camera, dunno how..