Canopus, Elton and I have a short Mersing observation trip on 8 Feb 2008. The trip there was smooth except the usual "Chinese New Year road tax"
. We reach the site at around 19:00, the sky was still quite bright and weather was cloudy and very windy. We setup our scope, Canopus 12.5" "Obby" and my little cute Vixen R135 Newtonian, and wait for the sky to get dark and clear up.Shortly after the sky become dark, portions of the sky took turns to clear up... not totally clear up as I think there are thin layer of high cloud present... but better than overcast. We start to observe randomly as target of opportunity pop up with ElTon HOt accesSory on the scope 90% of the time...
I didn't do a proper record of the objects we seen as the weather wasn't that good. Below are a list on some of the "well known" objects we seen:
1) M1 (Crab Nebula): Can clearly see the shape of the Nebula, but doesn't look like any crab (include horseshoe crab) I know of.
2) M41: Very nice Open Cluster with a distinct orange star in the middle and visible to the naked eye in Mersing dark sky.
3) M42/M43 (Orion Nebula): We had a long and good look at this nebula... can see the structure of the Nebula clearly and although we had seen this Nebula many, many times over the years, but it keep amaze us every time we look at it. WOW!!!!
4) M44 (Beehive Cluster): A big open cluster visible to the naked eye.
5) M45: Nice bright and very big open cluster, but look better in binocular.
6) M46: Open cluster visible to the naked eye in Mersing dark sky... very fine like tiny diamonds in the sky. The Planetary Nebula, NGC 2438, in the cluster can be easily seen.
7) M47: Bright Open cluster visible to the naked eye in Mersing dark sky.
8) M65/M66/NGC 3628: The galaxies in Leo... Not sure which is which as the sky condition was not that good and I'm a Galaxy observing Newbie. Only remember one of it is brighter than the rest.
9) M78: Look like triangular shape at low power.
10) Eta Carinae: The weather wasn't good at the south as most of the cloud was covering at that location. Took a quick look at it through my Vixen R135 Newtonian and Obby before we end our observation at 2am.
Anyway, there are quite a number of galaxies (what is the name of that long edge-on galaxy??) not in the above listing that Elton and Canopus had observed… I was happily cruising the Milky Way with my scope when they start their galaxies “hunting” as Leo and Coma Berenices rise higher up.
By the way, ElTon HOt accesSory was very nice, sharp to the edge (if you can see the edge) even in my Vixen R135 F4.6 (with focal reducer)... WOW!!! After seeing through it, view through Nagler look like tunnel vision... ha ha ha
Have a nice day.
