Directly adapted from Akarsh's observing report
This photography session was a successful one.
Milky Way: (an index of sky conditions)
That day's Sagittarius Milky Way was something phenomenally good -
unsurpassed in the past. The
Milky Way extended from Scorpius till beyond Deneb to near the region of
the open cluster M39 !! Dark
rift was visible even in Cygnus !
Schedule:
We were six of us (including our friend Chetan, a resident at the
observing site there). Sridhar, Sridhar's friend Prashanth, Nitin,
Akarsh and me. Akarsh and Nitin reached there early, before sunset, and
setup the
equipment, only to see thick black rain clouds pouring down rain. They
hauled their equipment back to a shelter and were getting our optics
right... just when Nitin spotted a snake - could be a Cobra too - about
2 meters away. The snake just slithered away, perturbed by the commotion
and excitement they made...
I joined them after this
incident. Sitting on the ground, discussing more about animals and snakes, we decided it was
time to have our dinner and did the same. After dinner, we saw that we
had a clear patch in the east. We hauled back our instrument to a
convenient place and Akarsh started to north-align our photography
piggyback scope (4.5" Celestron - Sridhar's!). We even pulled out the
observing scope (his 8" f/8) and Chetan and Nitin started
observing moon etc. Very soon, within about half an hour, the sky
cleared completely!!!! We couldn't do much till the moon set... However
we did find some Messier stuff. Interestingly, our beginner friend, young
school-going Chetan
there managed to find M13, the Hercules Cluster, with Akarsh's
telescope, looking at a map!!! Sridhar and Prashanth joined us at about
12:00 midnight. He reached there by his car.
Photography:
Sridhar and Prashanth started off with some exposures of moon and
Jupiter. Sridhar had a Sony
Manual Digital Camera and Prashanth had a digital SLR. Unfortunately, we
couldn't take bulb
exposure on his SLR, as he didn't have the remote for it. My Tamron
Zoom lens (28mm - 105mm) on Vivitar V3800N body was used for the purpose.
It was loaded with ISO 800 film. All photos mentioned are tracked piggyback
unless mentioned, with
Sridhar's 4.5" Celestron Scope.
Sridhar's exposures:
1. Jupiter with moons
2. The moon (excellent one!)
3. The moon overexposed highlighting clouds...
4. A few constellation photographs, maybe.
5. Milky way showing M24, M8, M20-M21, M7.
6. Ptolemy's cluster in detail - stars resolved.
Prashanth's exposures:
1. Jupiter with moons
2. The moon, with tree background etc.
3. Sagittarius Milky Way (ISO 1600!! Excellent! Like a tracked exposure
- lots of Milky Way got
recorded!!! in 30 seconds!!!!!!)
4. Even though it was very very small, we got the comet 73P with a tail!
(in 30 seconds!!!)
5. Cygnus constellation
My exposures:
1. Comet 73P at 50mm focal length for 5 minutes, tracked piggyback on
800 ISO film
2. Comet 73P at 70+mm focal length - with lots of tracking errors:-(
3. Untracked Exposure to catch meteors...
4. Scorpius Milky Way... - with tracking errors.
Akarsh's exposures:
1. Sagittarius Milky Way. at 50mm
2. Cygnus and the Summer Triangle. at 28mm
Nitin's exposures:
1. M7 at high zoom, abt 70mm.
Meteors:
We estimate we have seen about 40 meteors. We had the Aquarids shower,
due to Halley's comet
remnants. Very large ones, slow ones, bright ones, with trails, etc.
were seen. Excellent indeed.
We hope to have captured a beautiful one on film! But when the negatives
were developed not one meteor got recorded inspite of the camera facing
in the same directions.
Everybody enjoyed the meteors. We also saw several satellites. We even
saw meteors cut across
our field of view through our instruments.
Comet 73P:
Fragment 'C' was visible with a long tail in our friend's 7x50
binoculars! Everyone saw
it. Sridhar appreciated it to the maximum by shouting out in excitement!
I had been keeping notice of this historic comet which broke up into
pieces along with Akarsh. We had carried out regular observations in a
2-week period.Here is the link to the photo gallery of those taken by
Prashanth, who had got along a digital camera with him. The highlight is
the registering of the comet 73/P in only 30 seconds.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/spadix/sets/72057594128038947/
