Monday, January 31, 2005

20-Jan-2001: Night 20:40-10:15, Tai Mo Shan

The seeing was 8, but transparency is not good, it's 6.5 at best.  There were also clouds over the sky, the weather was foggy and dew was serious: star maps and backpacks were soaked, the Ranger was safe with a cheapy paper made temporary dew shield.

In short, we found no new object.  However, we saw more detail in old objects.

First, Cassini division was very obvious, even detectable without averted vision.  This was the first time with my little Ranger.  We saw a number of cloud bands as well, they were not subtle.  Next to the Jupiter, the GRS was excellent.  Perfectly detectable without using averted vision as well.  We could detect over 8 cloud bands clearly that night as well.  I could also see a satellite coming out from the back-side of the planet.

M42 was fan shaped, we had never detected this shape as obvious as this time.  Other dimmer objects were no as nice due to the sub-optimal transpareny.

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