I already posted that I am going to Star Party with Bangalore Astronomical Society. I finished my trip last night. Thought of sharing experience of my first sky observation session with BAS.
Naveen took care of introducing BAS members to all of us, I actually knew many of them already. Since observation session was going to be at night, we went to Talakaveri & came back in the eve. Trekking & getting lost inside the forest with new friends was lot of fun! We were back in the eve & started preparing to Star Party. That wasn’t much for me to prepare, but BAS crew was busy setting up the Telescopes, Binoculars on top of tripods. Naveen divided us into groups & assigned one BAS member to show & explain objects. There were three groups, one with naked eyes (;)), one with binoculars & the one with a huge Telescope! The idea was to look at objects with naked eyes, binocs & telescope & find how different they are. We went through many objects in the same way. I was impressed with double cluster, it looked as a small little white patch for naked eyes. Amar setted up his binoc to point to double clusters, I was curious to see how it looks like through binocs. It was awesome, through binocs, I was able to see two star clusters beside each other, I could see the stars in it overlapping on each other. It was not end, I was even more happy to see how spectacular it is via Shashank’s telescope. I could see the separation between stars clearly. I looked at Shashank to express my “wooooww” & looked back, bah! one cluster was gone! Shashank was ready to answer me & told me about movements of stars & sky. I asked hell lot of questions to Shashank & he was glad to answer them.
As observation session carried on I saw Andromeda galaxy, Orion Nebula, Bode’s & Cigar galaxies, Saturn with rings & two moons many more objects. Shashank wanted to show me how he does Astro Photography, but unfortunately sky got fogged & dew drops started accumulating on lens of his camera. But I got a good explanation about astro photography by Naveen. He told about lot of factors involved in astro photography including tracking, piggy packing..etc. Observation was great, it was my first.
I thank all BAS organizers & volunteers to make this to happen. Hope I would get time for next starparty.
Photos:
Pics of the trip are available on my flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/hnprashanth/sets/72157612953776521/. Don’t expect for any astro photographs, I am not into that yet. There is also no photographs of telescopes, equipmnets etc, because it’s not allowed to use flash lite in observation session. But sure, the pics gives you an idea how we enjoyed our trip 