Observation Report 3th sep 2005 -Mersing

[MooEy]

Finally finish writing the report for the 3/9/05 mersing trip. I’m still suffering from overdose of starlight. I guess this is one of my best mersing trips.

13 of us were present, Richard low, weixing, Elton, arief, zong yao, Justin, joo beng and his 2 kids, danny, matthew, kochu and me

Equipment present were – teleport 10, portaball 8, 7” raycraft newt + gpdx/ss2k, c9.25, c5, 127mak, orion 80ed + lxd55, megrez 80 + lxd 75.

We left sg at around 2.20pm at lavender and managed to reach the restaurant at 5.40pm for dinner. On the way to mersing, it was raining here and there. Did not look gd, however Richard(airconvent) did send us a sms wishing us gd luck. I guess that sms did work. We met kochu and matthew at the restaurant, as well as joo beng and his gang. After dinner we left for mersing town to do some last min shopping before going to the ob site.

We hit the ob site before the skies darken. We each choosed our location and got our scopes set up. No prize for guessing who was the fastest in setting up. Venus and Jupiter were smiling at us, although not as close as Thursday.

As the skies darken, the clouds start to pour in. Most of the skies is overcast except for scorpius region. During this season, scorpius is already on it’s side and the teapot is already quite high.

I quickly took down a few familiar objects before passing the scope over to Justin. Justin is one of my guys from Republic poly astro, this is his first attempt at deep skies hunting and it seems to be very enjoyable for him. For a 1st timer, he managed to take down 20-30+ objects on his own throughout the night. I guess mersing skies is just so gd for newbies to start learning. Objects taken down during this part of the skies, m4, m6, m7, ngc 6231, m8, m20, m21, m23, m80, m57, m56, m29,

I started hopping around, going to elton’s teleport and arief’s 7” raycraft newt with ss2k. also did visit joo beng and his c9.25. I guess weixing and Richard are having a lot of fun with the teleport as well, since both the c5 and 6” newt was sitting there collecting dew.

As usual, the summer triangle is a fun place to visit. Veil was impressive in the 10” teleport with the UHC filter on. Richard had to show me the not so nice part of the veil, which is a very long line running from the top of the fov to the bottom, before showing me the nicer part of the veil. Impressive I must say.

I went around stealing green lasers. A very useful tool I must say, since it allows me to point out any star or object, making it very easy to show the constellations to both Justin and zong yao.

Arief was struggling with his new 7” raycraft. It seems that his scope wasn’t collimated before he left sg. I went over and spend some time figuring out the collimation part with him. Initially I plug in my collimator and we started adjusting the secondary mirror. Then I looked at the laser collimator, it seems properly collimated already since there’s only 1 red spot on the face of the laser collimator. Arief powered up the sky sensor and found that the scope is still very off collimation. Weixing went over to help with his collimator and chesire eyepiece. With the chesire eyepiece, it was very obvious that the secondary mirror is not exactly in the middle of the scope. I told arief to ignore the off centered secondary since there’s nothing much we can do, we just have to live with a 6”+ scope instead of a 7”. Weixing later pointed out that the returning beam actually shoots out of the scope, instead of shooting back to the secondary mirror and onto the face of the laser collimator. I guess that’s y initially I thought it was already properly collimated. I guess we still have much to learn from weixing, the pro at collimating newts. After some turning of knobs on the primary, we managed to get the entire scope properly collimated. Anyway, it’s 9.30pm when arief finally got his 6”+ newt properly collimated. 2hrs wasted struggling with collimation >.<

I went over to disturb matthew and kochu, who were busy imaging. Kochu was having fun with m31, while matthew is imaging Cygnus, trying to catch the north American neb. The 1min exposures look promising. I guess I will leave it for him to post the pictures himself.

Went back to do some more obbing, took down m27, m71, m31. m27, better known as the dumbbell nebula, appears as a large ball. If u look carefully u can tell the difference between the middle area and the outer area, which normally appears as red and green in astrophotographs. The central star of m27 is easily seen. M71 is a gobular cluster in sagita, not too hard to find. After Richard told me where the coat hanger is, I went over and take that down as well. It was a little too large for my 40x. had to pan around a little to see the entire coat hanger. M31 is the very well known andromeda galaxy. My last trip to mersing did not show m31 that well since it’s too low in the horizon. But this time it’s much higher. M31 showed a very bright core and its arms completely overwhelm my puny fov. It was much more than my 40x could take. M32 was spotted at around 8o’clock of the core. A pretty nice sight, considering it’s as bright as m31’s core in sg.

I continued walking around, disturbing as many people as I can. It seems that arief is still having problems. His skysensor is erratic. It refuse to slew when he press the buttons on the controller. His mount was severely overloaded, thus it’s already hard to move in RA, added the balancing problem, the motors refuse to move. Eventually we ended up balancing the scope again before it would work properly. I guess he had a lot of practice doing goto alignment at mersing.

Feeling tired, I took a short nap back at the mini bus. I could feel the breeze inside the mini-bus. It must be very cold outside. Rations was low, we did not expect to be this hungry during this trip. Luckily we were saved by joo beng and danny. Danny bought lots of chicken from KFC and joo beng had quite a large supply of hard boiled eggs. Me and Justin enjoyed a little of the KFC and his c9.25. it seems that joo beng is working hard to log as many objects as he could. Running the tour on his cg5-gt mount, he took down many interested objects and then start recording on his pda. I guess I will let him list the objects that he has logged.

Since it’s quite late already, I had to take over the portaball while Justin and zong yao are resting. There was an informal competition on finding the faint galaxys in the sculptor area. I did not really feel like finding much, but those objects weren’t too hard and I bagged a few of them. Ngc 253 was impressive. It is a very large edge on galaxy. At 40x, it took up half of the fov. For those looking for not too hard galaxies, do consider the sculptor area. Ngc 247 and ngc 55 which was somewhere near it is nice too.

I tried ngc 7293 after those dim but big galaxies. Ngc 7293 is listed in my book as a planetary nebula. I was expecting one of those super elusive and small PN slightly bigger than a star or somewhere there. I was completely blown off when I found it. What the, this thing is even bigger than dumbbell. I quickly shouted out the ngc number, Richard and Elton confirmed that that object is the legendary helix nebulae. No wonder it’s so freaking big and nice.

Arief finally got his 6”+ newt and ss2k working properly. I went over and wasted some time there. We spend some time testing some eyepieces, mainly the nagler t6 13mm, the pano 15 and the burgress/tmb 6mm. I like the burgress/tmb 6mm a lot. It had nice eye relief, 60 degrees of fov which is sharp to the edge.

Towards the end of the session, at around 5am, Elton finally managed to get his dsc up and working. The rest of the guys are sleeping already. Me and Elton wasted no time in bagging objects. We quickly start off from west to east, taking down m35, m36, m37, m38 on the way. Ngc 2158 was taken down together with m35. m35 appears as a large open cluster which is filled with lots and lots of stars. The stars inside m35 are dimmer than in open clusters like m7/m45 however there are much more stars to be seen. Ngc 2158 which is the bonus item for finding m35 appears as a little dim open cluster which can only be seen with averted vision. The size is much smaller than the overwhelming m35.

M36, m37, m38 are the 3 open clusters in auriga, all 3 of them pack lots of stars in them, with m36 being the nicest of the trio. We took down monoceros area as well. Ngc 2244, which is the star cluster inside the rosette nebula was seen easily, however the nebula, ngc 2237 itself is pretty much invisible. Putting on the uhc filter and forcing myself to use avert vision, I felt that I could make out a little bit of nebulousity around the cluster. However the rest did not agree with my observation. I guess we shall try again in the future when rosette is much higher in the skies.

Since ngc 2301, an open cluster that looks like a Christmas tree, is somewhere close, we wasted no time in taking down that object. M50 is somewhere close too, we took a quick peep, another open cluster. M46/47 is very near now. We moved on. M46 showed it’s planetary neb easily. Ngc 2423 was taken down as well. Consider it a free gift for taking down m46/47.

We took down m79, a gobular cluster just right side of the rabbit lepus. It’s another of those small gobulars. The interesting thing is that there is very little gobular clusters in the winter skies, thus m79 itself can be considered unique.

Moving on, m41 was seem in canis major, however due to the cluster being a little too big, it did not really look that nice in the 20mm, we did not have much time to change eyepiece so we left that alone.

Ngc 2362 was taken down; it’s on the left of the triangle in canis major. A very small and dim open clusters. It glittered and smile at me. We moved quickly to m93, another small open cluster. Ngc 2451 and ngc 2477 is too low in the horizon so we left those 2 alone.

The interesting part is coming. Elton quickly moved towards the fornax region. He wanted to show me 2 dim galaxies, somewhere near mag 10. I took a peep in the eyepiece. I saw 1 dim galaxy below a rather bright star in the fov. Towards the bottom and 8 o’clock of that galaxy is another galaxy. I moved the scope around. Oh no, another 2 galaxy entered the fov, making it 5 galaxies. Pushing the scope further down towards 8o’clock direction, another 3 galaxies are found. Towards the right side of the starting point, which is the galaxy below the bright star, there’s another galaxy, making it a total of 9 galaxies in that area along. Maybe I shall just call that area as the MooEy galaxy cluster or something.

Continue moving in the southern area, we took down a lot more faint and small galaxies and planetary nebulaes, so many of them that I somehow lost count. They seem to come in pairs, sometimes even more. I reckon we took down at least another 10 objects in this area alone.

As we continue to work on the dim galaxies, we could see some brightening in the south east direction, probably from the town area or something. The galaxies gets harder and harder as the skies start to brighten, eventually the crazy dim galaxy bagging session ended.

Saturn was up, we took a peep, not nice at all since it’s too near to the horizon. We took a peep at mars. I could make out the syrtis major and another feature towards the right side of it. Some dark patch. Elton took a quick peep and noticed it too. The mars inside the scope seemed to be moving towards 1 side, signs of miscollimation. We did a quick check, it was obviously off. Quite amazingly that we spend so much time enjoying a miscollimated scope, maybe the pentax are really gd in correcting for miscollimation :x after the collimation we took a peep at mars again, did not look good since the atmosphere is limiting the views.

[qu1xs1lv3r]

i gotta get myself in one of this trips!

[acc]

Great OB report MooEy! Felt as if I was there!

cheers
cc

[elton]

Mooey, the brighter galaxy under the bright star is NGC 1365 in Fornax. I counted 5 in the 1 deg fov and and 5 more panning slightly to the left and right. Looking at the star atlas now, there are actually quite a number of similar galaxy clusters in the neighbouring constellations and in the other galaxy-rich constellation such as leo and virgo. It's just that we seldom pay attention to them when observing from Singapore, the 10th mag filter limit I set on TheSky didnt help either. Should raise the limit to 12 next time in Mersing.

Highlights of last night include :
- ngc 253 : it was large and so bright that we could see lots of detail in the core, including 5 star-like points there. Has the most interesting core of any galaxy i've seen, M31's is just a very bright boring oval.
- veil throught teleport, 40mm pentax XL + richard's 2" O-III, 2 deg FOV, 8mm exit pupil. Breathtaking 3D effect of smoke floating in a sea of stars. lots of structural details
- ngc 7293 helix nebula : more 3D effect of smoke ring on stars. large
- Fornax galaxy cluster : always thought that a 14" scope was needed to see galaxy clusters. thrill of seeing many objects in an fov

Must say that richard and mooey are impressive human gotos!
Looking forward to the next trip.

[Airconvent]

looks like I missed a very fruitful trip...

nice report mooey....you should be a reporter or something!

rich

[ariefm71]

Great night! for the first time I bagged more than 60 M and NGC objects in less than 4 hours of observing. Accurate GoTo and premium mirror do make a difference. Managed to catch some sleep as well. Thanks to Mooey, I need to get a few more accesories: kendrick laser, 15mm pano, rotating tube rings, a set of astronomik filter, ... :-(

[kohjb]

<Updated with photo>

This was my first trip to Mersing. The skies were FANTASTIC !! Absolutely unbelievable. Mersing is truly a great ob site as my success rate is 100% !! Hahaha...

Mooey's reporting is great as always !! At the ob site, I equate him to Robin Hood.....steals stuff to share with others :k-evil: But he always returns it lah :k-thankyou: Haha...

Posted my son's, Jared's photo of the telescope/sky. He's very proud of it. I wouldn't even have thought of taking this shot. But Matthew is also a treasure trove of information, which really led to the camear appearing and Jared taking the photo. So much to learn. Our group was comprised of myself (designated driver), Danny (co-driver, sleeping-driver-waker-upper), sons Jared and Justin. As we were novices, we set up the most elaborate campsite - with three tents, air mattress, tables and chairs, etc etc. Very comfy, but of course lecheh to setup/tear down (Jared was camp director).

My list of hits (though I actually am not into "collecting" views) are : M32, Andromeda galaxy, Sculptor galaxy, Eta Cas, Psi Piscium, Zeta Piscium, M103, M33, M74, Little Dumbell, Gamma Aries, Triangle cluster, Lambda Ari, Almach, Double cluster, Ngc891, 30 Aries, M34, M77, Gamma Cetus (couldn't split this).

Really looking forward to the next trip. Was frustrated this trip with not being able to take astrophotos through my scope, but I am actually very satisfied with the great visuals !! Astronomy teaches one to be very very patient..... Next trip's objective, imaging using the Meade DSI (w/o polar alignment). and the ETX 125. After that, want to learn how to achieve proper polar alignment, then guided astrophotography. My personal goal, is to have a photo of all 101 Messier objects. Hmm....after that, I am done, and will donate away all my equipment. Hahahhahaha....(evil laughter)...

[chrisyeo]

nice report mooey....you should be a reporter or something!

rich

Agreed!

Admin, can we make this thread sticky?

Chris

[MooEy]

Part 2 of the report

ok ok, i'm joking about part 2 of the report. just some random thoughts here and there that i wish to voice out.

Richard(aircon vent) earlier mention that rlow has put together a dream team consisting of some nice scopes. after the trip i felt that richard low has indeed put together a dream team, not consisting of scopes but rather the people there. richard, weixing and elton are very experienced observers and great gotos. without the 3 of them pointing out the interesting things to see in each objects, i believe i would be missing out alot of the details. stuff like the central star in m27, the core of ngc 257, bits and pieces of the veil neb would be easily missed out.

the trip was a huge success partly due to the superb skies and also all the participants there. without the participants we would not have such a great trip. it was a great sharing session for many of us. some share their views thru the scopes, some shared their equipment while other shared their experiences. many thanks to those who were present, many thanks to elton for the teleport, many thanks to richard and weixing for pointing out the juicy parts of each objects, many thank to weixing and joo beng for the green lasers, many thanks to joo beng for the views thru the c9.25, many thanks to arief for the views thru the raycraft newt and the fun ss2k, many thanks to danny for the nice kfc chicken, and many many many thanks to richard low for organising this trip.

for those who felt they have been left out since they were not able to make it. richard low is planning another trip somewhere next month, do sign up early since we are quite limited on seats and quite a few of them has already been booked already.

~MooEy~

[kohjb]

Actually that's very true. Want to recognise the great role that Richard Low played in this. Great organizer. I know that it was a lot of effort for him to pull all of this together, keeping everyone informed, tying up all the loose ends, etc. So THANK YOU Richard !! If it weren't for you, I would have missed one of the best experiences in my life. This ranks as high as my trips to Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and Mt. Kinnabalu in E. Malaysia, where the night views were just mesmerizing.