We had a small observing session over at Toa Payoh Central too. I was joined by Zong Yao, Richard (not Airconvent) and the occasional family or passer-by.
Though the sky was very clear when I looked out of the window at 8pm, huge clouds came out of no where just after I brought everything down at around 8:30pm and the whole sky was covered. It took approximately an hour's wait before our primary target, Saturn finally appeared through a gap in the clouds.
From there, we were "see-sawing" between Saturn and the Moon : when clouds moved in to cover Saturn, the area where the Moon was in cleared..then when the Moon was covered, Saturn re-appeared from behind the clouds again !
You should have seen the way the scope was manouvered to observe these 2 targets - like a see-saw ! Around 10:30pm, the sky suddenly cleared completely. All the clouds just "disappeared" ! And this was also the time where we experimented with various combinations of barlow and eyepieces we had with us...we even managed to go up to 1143x
magnification on Saturn with a 4mm + 2x barlow + 3x barlow ! (well, you only get about one good chance like this per year... so why waste it ? ) At this mind numbing magnification, at least we could still identify Saturn, it's rings, the main belt and a bit of the Cassini Division, but the image was already breaking down and the occasional light breeze added to the challenge of getting a clean focus and a steady image. At 1143x, Saturn was HUGE and stretched across nearly 75% of the Radian's 60 deg AFOV. My RA drive also decided not to work even though I did replace the battries with brand new ones in the afternoon, so observing at high magnifications wasn't a really pleasant experience as we had to pause after every few seconds to get the object back into view. Also, all 3 of us agreed that the Vixen GP couldn't really handle the scope very well, and vibrations introduced by the wind or from focusing at high magnifications (3XX - 4XX) and adjusting the slow motion knobs took a longer than desired time to damp out.The brightly lit environment of Toa Payoh Central made it impossible to do any comet hunting or serious deep sky viewing (we did had a brief look at M42 when it was directly overhead), so we were only restricted to Saturn, Jupiter and the Moon. All were superb. We did have a great time exploring the Moon didn't we, Zong Yao ?
From 1am onwards, we turned our attention to a rising (and *ugh* boiling) Jupiter, and we had to wait till 2am before we managed to get a better and steadier image. Just before we packed up, we managed to catch the GRS that was slowly rotating into view. It was about 2:45am when we our session ended. Wow, so we actually spent 6 solid hours standing around the scope in the middle of Toa Payoh ! A great way to end 2003 and cross into 2004 huh
