20 October 2007

Schedule:
Three of us, Mr. Rajendra, his friend Yogananda and Me met at 4 pm at Hebbal, to the north of Bangalore. Mr. Rajendra was my very close friend who was last present during the observing session of my first comet, nearly 4 years ago! Now I was again out for observing with him, this time with his handmade 8" f/8 equatorial scope. Also we had a 20x60 Russian Tetron binoculars owned by his friend, Mr Yogananda. I had a 10x50 Olympus binocs.

I had to travel around 25 km from my home in South Bangalore until here, to start off the journey in their Maruti car, all loaded with the instrument and several baggage. Just when we left, it started raining heavily and continued for long. I thought the bad start will have dampened the spirit of these 2 people, and people quite elder to me in age, not being used to such anguishes created by Mother Nature. I had to pacify them by telling this always happened in the past and skies do "always clear after midnight"! We continued and by the time we were on the way to Dodballapur, the roads had become dry and the sky above showed a small patch of blue, still being loaded with clouds elsewhere. We reached Hosahalli slowly in the small car when it had just got dark.

We removed and setup all our belongings, from trekking stuff to a mobile phone with external speakers to entertain us for the night! By now the sky was all covered up with thick rain clouds. We had setup the equipment in the small corridor of the school, and the rain water was seeping into all our belongings. Suddenly the lights went off, good news for us, because there was a bright lamp close to us which would have ruined our observing. The surroundings had become totally pitch black and we could not see what's beside us!! Later on we realized that the lights remained gone for the whole night, an occurrence which seldom happens. We immediately hurried into the classroom of the school where it was all dry and cozy, comfortable, and dark. It was only raining and there were the thickest, darkest layers of clouds looming over our heads. We had to just keep on waiting in anticipation.

When in the room, we spoke, discussed and listened to the songs in the mobile attached to the external speakers, which was quite loud. We lied down, even slept and I had set an alarm for 12:00-12:30 am. I went out to see the sky and there was no difference. There was something unique that happened here. While returning back, my intuition (based on past experience) grew stronger that the sky should start getting clear as it's past midnight. I again set the alarm close to 1am, went out and didn't see any clarity in the North direction I was looking. Then Mr. Yogananda looked East which I had missed out and we both saw...stars, lots of them! The sky was clear in a patch. It was like my internal sixth sense had worked! We stepped out for observing.

METEORS:

This was a day before the peak of the Orionid meteor shower, and a day wouldn't have mattered in the activity of the meteors. My first meteor came when the sky cleared up little bit, just as we stepped out of the room. It was at sharp 1:00 am and this one was long and bright yellow in Taurus, leaving a trail behind. I estimate it's magnitude to be around -1, brighter than Mars. It was a good start. In the course of time, we saw several other ones, equally bright and faint & big and small. My total count went to 10 meteors in the little clearance we could get. The next highlight meteor was at 4:20 am in the Southern sky. This one was brighter than Venus, and left a "dual-trail". As it burned up, it left the normal smoke trail, but when at the end it dissipated totally, it left a 'scar'. I had not observed this before. There were 2 more of them, long ones visible through the not-so-thin haze, that means they should have been bright.

Mr. Yogananda who was with me, counted a couple more. Approximately 15 meteors in two hours, with bad conditions, is pretty good for Orionids.

The sky became bad once again, this repeated for some time. We used to go in and come out as this happened. There was a second clearance after waiting for some more time. This time the sky became dark like...whew! There were many stars in the Northern Milky-Way. They had really become darker than before, easily 6th mag. We all gasped a sigh when we saw this. And moreover this feeling was because we were seeing dark skies after a long time.

OBSERVING:

There was very little observing I could do this time as there was limited time. I even don't remember what I looked at! Whatever it was, was the repeat, nothing new as sky was bad and we had limited time before skies could get clouded again. Observed Orion Nebula while sketching, it was good as usual. Among the other objects observed were Double Cluster, M35 in Gemini, NGC 1316 (Fornax A) galaxy, M79 globular, NGC 2903 in Leo. Also observed Andromeda galaxy with it's companion M32, the view was disappointing, could not find the other faint companion M110.

At dawn, I pointed the scope at Venus and saw the resplendent planet at nearly half phase. Before that was Mars. It had been 4 long years since I saw Mars last at it's best. This time I did not have a high magnification eyepiece, hence had to manage with the wide field one. Saw it as bright red, probably with hints of white at the edges. I did not bother to verify details as I was more keen on getting done with the sketch of M42 (Orion Nebula). Just below Venus was Saturn, saw it with a wide field eyepiece, again as there was no high power one.

BINOCULAR OBSERVING:

I aimed a friend's 20x60 Russian Tetron binocular at Eridanus region, in hopes of 'galaxy-testing'. All this time being used to a 10x50 Olympus with good optics, I wanted to see how much difference does a 20x60 binocs make, this one not as good quality as the former. They were easy to hold handheld, they were as 'light' as 10x50's!

After referring to Akarsh's Cambridge Star Atlas, when I pointed at the region of the bright 8.5 mag Fornax A (NGC 1316) galaxy, I
spotted the triangle of 6-7th mag Xi-stars and below it a bright and evident fuzzy patch. It was as bright as a star and big, later on
hard to believe that it was the galaxy itself. It was right there, enlarged...anyone could have seen it! A 9.3 mag star close to it could be seen with some ease. Confirmed the position with the 8" scope. Did not attempt for the nearby NGC 1365 (mag 9.6). Then came the turn of NGC 2903 in the Sickle of Leo and M81 (didn't see M82). These two too appeared "enlarged". Until now, NGC 2903 with 10x50 was pretty difficult. I don't know why a 20x60 was making things appear larger but truly, a slight change in aperture and magnification makes some difference!

ASTRO-SKETCHING:

This was the thing which I had wanted to seriously lay my hands, after a long time. There were several things in sketching I had wanted to try, being inspired by our brilliant fellow foreign astro-sketchers. Earlier in the day I had purchased a black chart paper and white pencil (could not get anything except glass marking pencil). I had wanted to try white-on-black sketching eagerly, something which gives natural views of the night sky rather than the reverse, traditional black-on-white.

There was so much to draw, but with these horrible and fluctuating sky conditions, I needed to start with something easier. What better than Orion Nebula...big, bright and majestic. I took the white pencil and made small round circles on the chart paper, and started with precision. By the time I could finish half, the skies became clouded again, leaving only an incomplete sketch in my hand. I also started with Pleiades which was heading for setting in the west. I carefully observed the brightest stars and marked them in the circle on the drawing sheet. Pleiades too got covered with clouds by then. This was frustration galore. The quality of the sketch of M42 looked good, and I am sure this white-on-black sketching surely has a bright future ahead! I hope to very eagerly get it completed soon.

By now it was dawn and the sky had grown a deep blue. Venus was majestic, at it's brightest. The twilight color in the background only added to the aesthetic looks. I felt like sketching a naked-eye portrait of the scenic view. I kept the image in mind and thought of transforming to paper with colors later on. I wish to complete this one too.

JOURNEY BACK:

We left Hosahalli at sharp 8:00 am, quite late, but leisurely after packing our bulk of belongings. We decided to take an alternate but longer route way back, to avoid the 10 km bad stretch of Hosahalli until the Andhra Pradesh highway. We took a diversion just 2 km after Hosahalli, passing the village Gundamgere and driving into the backside of the village. Here onwards the village road led us into tamed wilderness; it wasn't a forest anywhere, but the route was like a scenic jungle-trail, fascinating with trees, orchards, bushes, flowers, hills in the distance. To me it was a beautiful trip, and something unbelievable that such soothing scenery can exist even here. We crossed few small villages on the way with it's bustling morning life. We had traveled some 20 kms further to finally touch the highway to Andhra Pradesh, which we used to cut-off several kilometers before, to go to Hosahalli. We emerged before a village called Thondebhavi near Gauribidanur. There was the railway track running parallel to the road far away. Then seeing a train (probably going to Bangalore) racing on the track which was as small as a strand of string, compared to the huge hill in it's background, reminded me of the contemplation of how small are we compared to Mother Nature! There was a beautiful big lake on the way and further up, on a hill we could see the religious spot of Ghati Subramanya. The famous tourist destination Nandi Hills were also visible in the distance.

We rode on the highway back to Bangalore only to cross by the diversion we take to enter Hosahalli from the highway. As I mentioned earlier, we had taken an alternate route to get back on the highway, to avoid the bad roads and see possible routes out of Hosahalli. We reached Dodballapur after 10:30 and took another longer route, from Devanhalli 6-lane highway (en-route to the International Airport), instead of the shorter route to Yelahanka. Thus we had traveled at least 35-40 kms extra. We reached Bangalore at Mr Rajendra's home by 1:00 pm, and I bid them good bye and left for my place as late as 1:30 only to reach after 2:30 or so. I was very late by 3 hours, usually I used to reach home by 11:30 am, and now it was past afternoon, I was all tired, sleepy and stressed.