Mersing Comet Watch 04 (Part 1) - Long

[Airconvent]

Hi
Its called "Part 1" as I only went 1 day! I'll let the rest like CC and Samuel report on thewhat happened on the other days like tonight!

Title : Mersing Comet watch was organised by Singastro to chase the 2 comets Neat Q4 and Linear T7. I personally added F4 Bradfield to my list.
5D4N event for hardcore participants.

Weather : Bad. White clouds, no blue sky all the way to Mersing. The sky pleasantly cleared up after 7pm and we got fairly good clear skies the whole night. There were thick clouds in the horizon and some clouds think come in at 4am and covered 80% of the sky but cleared up within 30 mins. Terry and co were caught cooking noodles on site during that time! yum!
Overall not Mersing at its best. I would rate the transparency on that day 7.7/10. (for comparison : the best sky in Singapore is about 5/10)
Dew was not extensive althought our stuff began to get wet after 10pm.
Temperature was fluctuating between cold and sweaty hot throughout the night...very strange...

Site : Good news and Bad news. The road to the site is much better now but there are now more developments like running of power and phone cables. Could indicate some development work over the next few months.
Hopefully will not take the Mersing site away. May be just me but the distant Mersing town glow seems brighter now which means no Zoodical and Gegenshein lights visible. Tents were pitched everywhere plus gound sheets and combat safari beds. Matt and Kochu brought the whole works for imaging including tables, laptops, inverters, etc.

Equipment : I could not recall all the equipment but I think Remus brought his Takahashi 102mm for imaging. Other scopes present include MN56 (Samuel Ng), 2 x LX90 (Matt and Kochu), 10" LX200GPS (Wira) + 12" LX200GPS with bino viewer! (Wee Kiong), C8 (SP), Borg 76 (Phylliss), Antares 80mm refractor (Ice angel - Leslie), Tak FS60 (Chung Hooi), Celestron 80mm Refractor (Michael Lo), 25x100 Bino Viewer (Gavin Khoo), 8" Portaball (Chee Chien) , Celestron 6" Newtonian (Junwei), 10x25 bino (Ching Aeng), C90, Celestron Ultima 2000 (Mr Au), Tak Mewlon 250 on GM8 (Wira), Skywatcher 102mm with MV1 coating (Gary Goh), Takahashi FS78C (Woei Jiin) and maybe 1-2 scopes I may have left out!

It was also first light from Dr Chan Kay Heem's newly completed 10" Truss Dob resurrected from Chuan Yee's old Discovery Dob! He did have some balancing issues to iron out but overall a good scope. Key feature is he used a curved structure instead of a spider for the secondary which reduced spiking. Mr Au could not resist doing a collimation for his scope!

Wee Kiong's 12" was a monster and the biggest scope present. With a bino viewer installed, it gave 3D views of Omega Centauri. The resolved stars seemed to pop out of your view! Chuan Yee managed to catch a 3D jupiter as well. The Bino viewer was locally designed and was expected to compete with Televue! Watch for its launch later in the US!

I did not bring my ETX as Wira asked me to operate his LX200 but managed to bring my new Orion ED80 Apo scope for a spin. Also brought my new foldable bed as well. So did Samuel , who was dubbed "Vincent Snr no.2 for his white overall! (History : Vin Snr was the first to wear this in a previous session when he still owned the Portaball)

21 May Session Personal Specs : Personally observed 12 meteors including a green fireball and 5 satellites the whole night although there were much more that night.

Obs Report :

While the sun was still up, I managed to take my very first peek at the sun through Leslie's Antares refractor with Baader solar filter. Looks very nice with sun spots and all!

The night started with all the excitement of seeing 2 crescents in the evening. That of a new moon with a crescent Venus about 2 deg above it. A very nice view on my ED80! Then came the comets. After some reading, I successfully entered the 3 new comet's data into the LX200 autostar. (Fizzy 123, it works!). Linear T7 was near horizon and only visible with Bino. Neat Q4 was near zenith and was naked eye. On a bino, you can see its tail very clearly. Overall I think the main attraction was Neat Q4 with its bright core magnificent tail. I tried some imaging at 8 seconds on my ED80 (max for my camera without bulb mode) and sadly, nothing came out! Hope to see the other's efforts when the come back. On the LX200, apart from the tail, we could resolve the nucleus as well as the several layers making up the fuzzy edge. Cool!

After 1-2 hrs when comet fever died down, we proceed to the other objects. This is really a good time of the year as all the best objects are now on our side including Sagi and Scorpius region, ring nebula, dumbbell, etc. I extracted out my prepared "A" list of objects in this 2 constellations and intended to complete it but now able to due to time constraints.

While Wira was trying to practice drift alignment for his Mewlon on a G8 mount (with "teachers" Michael Lo and Chuang Yee), I had free play of the LX200. Its a breeze to use with GPS! Wira tried to align his scope the whole night but failed. Seems he would require more practice on this.

Objects Seen : Venus, Moon, comets T7&Q4, M4, M80, M62, M70, M22, M14, M10, M19. M12, M26, NGC6441,6388, 6352,5397,6541,6723, 6688,6652, 6638, M55,M26, M19, 6293,6316, 6304, 6558, 6553, 6544, 6355, M8, M20, 6302, 6337, M16, M17, 6644,M27,M57, M71, M56, M82, M13, M18, M7, M6, 6231, M25, M23, 6152, 6683, M11, 6704, 6588, M21, 6446, 6459, 6520, 7822, 6302, M51, M31, M108. Centaurus A Galaxy, IC5146. Managed to catch a planetary nebula NGC7337 which was rated Mag 20! Great! All of us including Chuan Yee were amazed. (Afternote : subsequently realised it was actually Mag 12.6...Error in the autostar database)

Apart from seeing on the scope, M51 was a bino object as well and I was able to resolve the 2 galaxies. On the LX200, the arms were visible.

Wide views on Gavin's 25x100 Bino was also a pleasure to see.
Star fields in the galactic centre seemed to pop out. A very satisfying experience. No wonder he brought this instead of his LX90 or C5.

Strangely, this time round, interest in the planets has waned and no one was really looking at them at all. I thought it was a great time to catch Saturn before she disppeared in the horizon but without my ETX, I lost interest as well.

My Orion ED80 Apochromatic Refractor first light : The objects on the LX200 were great but I also wanted to try out my ED80 as well. The scope was solidly built and the images were pretty decent as is expected of an apo scope.
With Sam's help, did an alignment and star test. The dfffraction rings were perfect although the TV diagonal was tested slightly off 45 deg angle but does not affect the image very much. At x150, Vega and Jupiter appeared clean with no hint of colour at all. At x300, however, above the scope's rated max usable mag, some hint of colour could be detected which was not a problem since I don't normally go above x150 anyway.

I tried my hand at manual star hopping again (after previous failed attempts on my ST90). I must say that with good clear skies and many stars , the red dot finder is superior to the finderscope in finding objects but back in Singapore, I'll take a 6x40 finder anytime! With Samuel's help, I was able to put the red dot finder to good and effective use and found more objects that night myself than all my previous efforts put together! The Neat looks good with its bright tail. I did not try Linear due to lack of alignment stars near horizon. Next I tried the ring but due to low mag, only managed a blurred dot. Dumbell was much better and I could see its structure clearly.
Surprised that M51 appeared on my Minolta Activa bino as 2 objects, with Chuan Yee's guidance, I located it on my ED and was pleasantly surprised at its detail. Could not make out the arms but at least it was clearly seen as 2 distinct objects. Unlike the high mags I was used to with my ETX, the most used eyepieces that night was my 32mm, 15mm, 4mm and 40mm. The 32mm yielded x18 and was the most ideal for looking for objects. Highest I went was for a 4mm+ 2xbarlow on Jupiter. Image was very soft as I had exceeded to max usable mag of this scope.
The swan nebula was superb and the image was very clear without any filter. More confident now, I tried the wild duck cluster. I must admit that aperture wins here. The images on the LX200, MN-56 and Portaball exhibited a cluster bathed in a milky bath with a hint of nebulosity. On the ED80, while it still good, it only gave a hint a nebulosity and when I tried to squeeze the mag up, it was not as resolved as the bigger aperture scopes.
The highlight for my scope was the Veil nebula. An lost cause for my ETX, wide field objects such as the Veil was perfect for my scope and it did not disappoint. After some errors in star hopping and correction, thanks to CC, The crescent Veil was clearly visible on my scope using a Thousand Oaks narrow band filter. In fact, I could discriminate that the crescent I am seeing was at least made of 2 joined together and perhaps a third one.
Amazingly, without the filter, the veil was totally invisible. All I saw as a dark sky with stars. The image of thge veil reminded my of the oohs and ahs when Vincent first showed it to me on his portaball 2 years back (now ownd by cc). Overall, I am very satisfied with the performance of this scope.

During the night, the battery began to conk on us and fortunately, we were able to borrow one from Wee kiong to power our heater while still running the LX200 on the "old" battery. With the heater tapped to a new source, the original battery lasted till morning before the battery low lamp came on. Thanks to WK for his help!

As the dawn broke, another first for me. My very first view of Mercury!
Appearing as a bright star low on the horizon, this object was definitely not for my ED80. The LX200 showed it at high magnification to be in semi circle boiling with multiple colours due to its position at the horizon.
After that at 6.25am , with the batt low lamp screaming for the past 45min, I powered down the scope and took a short nap before we packed up at 7+ and returned to Singapore.

Oh, BTW, Bradfield was a failure. We pointed at its predicted location but was not able to see it at all. Perhaps its mag is too low and without a tail, it looked like any one of the stars...sigh...

Hope the rest have a good night today and look forward to their reports and photos.

I took some photos of the people but will need time to load them onto the server, so do be patient!

Finally, thanks to Remus and team for organising this event to keep the local astro scene alive!

rich

[Airconvent]

Hi,
The photos have been uploaded!
There was a limit to the number of photos are I can upload, so I picked a selection...

http://www.singastro.org/album.php?cat_ ... 9&start=12

rich

[fizzy123]

Hi Rich,
it is good to hear ur success in keying in manually and the great observing time u had at Mersing. Can u shed some light on how u key in manually? 8)

[nF]

Richard, I have adjusted the settings for the personal album to be able to post umlimited photos onto the album so that you can post all of the photos online.

[nF]

fizzy123, can you post that post in a new topics? It will cause this topic to become a irrelevant topic in regards to the title.

[VinSnr]

Richard, wonderful report and photos! Glad you have had a good time there...

Samuel, you got to pay me image rights to wear that white overall man!! Hehehe.......

[Airconvent]

Richard, I have adjusted the settings for the personal album to be able to post umlimited photos onto the album so that you can post all of the photos online.

Thanks Junwei,
Only 3 more photos. Already uploaded!

rich

[nF]

novafusion is not junwei... is yong quan.....

[Airconvent]

novafusion is not junwei... is yong quan.....

sorry! mixed the 2 of you again. now that explains why you are not at Mersing! Anyway, Gavin has posted another report on singastro@yahoo.com .
I'll port it over so others here can read it as well. He has 2 photos, so I guess I transfer them over as well.

rich

[Airconvent]

Hi all,
Attached is a follow up report from Gavin Khoo who stayed 2 nights at Mersing posted on Singastro@yahoogroups.com :

BY GAVIN KHOO: Just to add on to Richard's post on our trip to Telok Sari to view
the two comets.

I got back this afternoon with the 2Nights/3Days sub-group. The
second night (Sat night) was disappointing. After viewing Comet
Neat C2001/Q4 again for about half and hour, we had to abandon the
observation session at around 8.30 or so as there were persistent
flashes and some distant thunder. Half the whole group went back to
the nearby Sari Mawar chalet for the rest of the night.

Anyway, the first night was quite good. Skies were clear throughout
that night, though the seeing quality was not as good as I've seen a
few times before at Telok Sari / Mersing. Quite a bit of haze.. so
that the sky was not black but greyish, though at about 4/5am it was
much better. The Milky Way stretched from Carina/Crux through
Sagittarius and then on to Cygnus... only in the tropics! Like a
boomerang that spans almost the whole sky.

Cygnus was a real gem for me this time: virtually the whole
constellation from Deneb to Albireo is one un-ending open cluster.
View was amazing through the 25x100mm giant binouculars. So many
stars!

Comet Neat was very distinct with optical aid. I think it was about
magnitude 4 and visible with the naked eye... but certainly not as
bright as Omega Centauri. The tail was obvious... it pointed in
the 1 o'clock direction. It stretched for about 2 degrees at
least. It was quite wide, though from my recollection, was not as
distinct (in terms of contrast) as Comet Ikeya-Zhang's tail in about
Feb 2002. That Comet was much nicer and more dramatic I think,
though we managed to view it for only about 5-10 minutes when it was
12 degrees abover the horizon before it sank out of view. That tail
was like a fan as I remember, and Neat's tail was more like a torch
light beam.

Back to Comet Neat... Quite a bit of detail could be seen in the
nucleus or core of the comet. I think we detected the motion of the
Comet by comparing its relative position next to a very faint star.
The Comet had moved a bit over half an hour. so, we weren't
hallucinating after all with wishing thinking by staring too much at
a globular.

Comet Linear? No tail, no comparison. The core was just as bright
though, and the thought of seeing two naked eye comets at the same
moment is something to really remember about this trip.

I have uploaded two photos in 640x480 size (to save space). It is in
the Photos section of this Singastro yahoo group in a new Albun
called CometNeatExpedition. One is a beautiful sunset photo with
the Moon and Venus in the background ... twin thin crescents just a
few degrees apart! (the view of this twinning through binoculars was
quite amazing) The other is the group photo taken today at the
Sari Mawar "chalett".

PS: thanks to the organisers for such a memorable trip!

Gavin.
Sun 23 May 2004

PS. I have added his 2 photos to the Singastro Airconvent Mersing Photos as well. Cheers

Rich