The trip there had been marred by heavy rain and constant lightinging strikes with visibility on the roads down to 200m only!
Parts of the road was so flooded that road barriers started floating around like boats and on one occasion, they flowed together with our car's movement, bringing chuckles to chee chien and rlow.
On arrival, it was already dark with 95% cloud cover and we found most of the Mersing Group had retired to their chalet for obs there instead, so the field was relatively clear save for a few new faces. One group from Ngee Ann led by Alfred was also there while Clifford was there with his "brood" . Miraculously, the sky cleared up within 2 hours and remained so all the way till morning. I would say sky condtion was about 80-90%% Mersing full potential.
The sky was good enough for me to see the coalsack for the first time. (I hadn't look for it in previous trips but became intrigued when Gavin mentioned it to me during the last trip.)
The highlight for that evening was the Portaball of course. rlow, the walking sky map was busy teaching everyone about the constellations and I cant help but joined in to listen too. He brought a case full of 2" pentaxes and that helped make the views a truly wonderful experience on the portaball. Chee Chien was busy showing everyone his favourite objects, sometimes with multiple repeat telecast!
The portaball performance was nothing shot of stellar for this country bumpkin. I had a little trouble with my N8 and lost alignment a few times due to alignment stars and battery problem, so in the end stopped after only several objects which was a waste because the goto was spot on last night.
Was truly amazed with the view through the Pentax 40 on the portaball. The FOV was so big it felt like looking though a bino and with 12.5" of aperture, stars and galaxies come alive! There were several first for me...
While the number of objects we clocked were low as compared with other trips, we made up for it with breathtaking views of the objects selected.
Firstly, I could make out clearly the arms of M51 for both galaxies. We had a really nice look at the Bug nebula and Centaurus A galaxies.
I must say I saw the Ring, Dumbell and Omega Centauri in an entirely new perspective. There were so much details it was truly a "wow"ing experience. Next rlow showed us the Helix nebula with magnification that enabled it to fill out half the FOV!
The rest of the night, we had fun with all the Sagitarrius objects (lagoon , swan, trifid, eagle ), a couple of ducks in the wild duck cluster and then moved on to several galaxies and globular clusters. Chee Chien found time to move on to the andromeda with 3 galaxies in the same view and impressed everyone with with views of all 3 major parts of the Veil. At my pestering, he also let us see the North American Nebula and while I cannot make out the famous shape, I could clearly see the Pelican Nebula next to it.
Meanwhile Kochu was busy imaging away and I saw a geat picture of the Ring nebula he took in full colour.
It was amusing seeing chee chien and rlow switching pentax "hand grenades " the whole night to enhance on the views. It was such a busy night that CC stayed way past his 2pm bed time to show everyone all the cool objects right up to 5am in the morning!
We are thankful for his sacrifice!
During the night, we also had some guest from the official mersing group joined us..including elusive Kay Heem and the generally M.I.A David Lian who made a special appearence! And while I did buy some buns, Clifford and gang also offered lots of snacks during the night to keep the passion going!
Jupiter was too glaring for useful views at night but towards morning when the sky brightened, we took another look and was amazed by the details we saw. I counted 7 bands although rlow claimed he could count 11. What was amazing was the details in the bands. I could make out waves in each band similar to what you would see in the Jupiter photos. This is the first time I saw Jupiter like that...awesome!
Overall , we had a good trip. The event ended with nasi lemak and roti prata (thanks to Clifford for giving us a treat!) before we proceeded back to Singapore.
rich
ps...sorry lah...no photos as in my haste, I did not bring one along. In anycase, it was already dark when we arrived. Hope the rest can upload their images here. cheers
"The universe is composed mainly of hydrogen and ignorance." 
Andromeda galaxy can be seen at the lower right.
