Monday, January 31, 2005

25-August-2002: Shek O'

The moon shall be bright but it is also a good "alarm" to force us to come home earlier since we all need to work on the next day. We didn't go out for observation for quite long since the birth of my baby girl.

Choosing a venue alone was not easy as before, since we rarely got chance to observe outside now. We all wanted to get better views, so we narrow down our choices on Shek O' and Tai Mei Tuk and we finally decided to go to Shek O'.

This time, we didn't spend time going to the end of the Big Head Island, instead we settle at a place where the Big Head Island serves as a shelter for the only strong light from far away.

This was the first time we saw milkyway clearly in Hong Kong, it extends rather long in the sky. What a sight!

This time, I took 40lb of equipment myself, and it sets a new record here. I was using the Ranger and the evil lies on the mount, the battery and all other stuff. The GR2-DX was real heavy, and another friend took out his notebook PC for using the roboscope option. The software stowed in my microdrive inside my digital camera, and installing software in the stony place was not a nice experience after all. After several rebooting, we got the software installed.

When the Roboscope PC link was installed, the keys on the pendant will be disabled by then which was bad enough. It was hard to press the keys on the PC lying on the floor while looking thru' the eyepiece at the same time. We failed to do even a two stars alignment in such a bad environment. Too bad that those equipments were wasting our time, and wasting our effort to bring them all out. We originally think it might save our time to hunt down our targets but it turned out to be opposite!

I proposed to turn off all the electronic stuff. The GR2-DX was good enough for me to scan around, finding object couldn't be easier as before, together with the Ranger.

Binoculars observing are always enjoyable. We looked at M7 and then M6, and then M8, and then scan up around to find M22 and those Messier objects near by. I swinged the Ranger to the Antares and it immediately reveals the M4, which I could never see in my apartment even with the 8"! But it shows so nicely with my 70mm right now!

The moon came out around 9:00p and we had a peek on it and then we packed up everything and enjoyed!

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