Hi KaiSing,
You should see my photos and compare them with yours and you will understand what noob really means. LOL. Your DF01 "Blue" shot is absolutely mindblowingly wicked! Love your landscape shots too, especially the Osaka Castle series. Unreal!! Great first attempt at the Milky Way.
Thanks for dropping by and saying hi. You and the other singastro semi-lurker really made my day, erm night I mean!
What an incredible night of seeing! Thank god (and Alvin) for the amazing porta mount that came just in time. Else, we would all be looking at a shaky Saturn through a Maksutov 5" and kicking ourselves for not having a bigger aperture scope deployed on a more stable mount.
Cassini division was so clear and contrasty I did not even have to try to see it. We didn't have a chance to binoview it since the crowd was building up from the moment I finished my setup at 8pm. But I am glad to poison your eyes with M7 through the binoviewer later in the evening.
Time to sell your camera lens to Michelle Chia to fund a new hobby.
Between enjoying a binoview of Saturn in great seeing alone or letting more people seeing it single-eyed for the first time, I will choose the latter anytime of the day. One of the highlights for me last night was to let a senior citizen to finally see Saturn after a few minutes of failed attempts despite changing the magnification and eyepieces. I have always made it a point to try my best to let someone see the intended object through the eyepiece no matter how long or impatient the queue is. Because it must be one of the most miserable feeling to see everyone else getting excited by what they saw but not able to experience some of those excitement for themselves.
The positive and happy energy generated in the crowd was truly intoxicating. It is nights like this that reminds me why I love sharing this wonderful hobby so much and to forget about those disappointing days when the sky was blue throughout the day but turns out to be cloudy at night. And also to laugh at the all the crazy criticism that a SCT is not good for planetary viewing because of blah, blah, blah.
The anticipation for yesterday's blue sky to transition into a night of great seeing was killing me, in a nice way I guess.
Later in the evening when the crowd was gone. Zong and me saw the Ring Nebula, the beautiful and colourful Albireo and M8 with some nebulosity.
This Meade with bob's knobs, like I told the previous owner before, really holds the collimation well. Definitely a keeper.
This is most probably my last sidewalk for this month (unless I see ring nebula naked eyes tomorrow
). Time to re-charge my mana and clean my optics for galaxy hunting in Milky Way skies next week.
