Birdy Sunday 2012-10-28

Together with my dad, we went to the airport to accompany my sister before she departs for Singapore. Afterwards, we head to the SM Mall of Asia for lunch and waste a few hours there. While waiting for the scheduled birding trip, we saw the aircraft carrier USS George Washington and many of her crews.

After taking some shots and observing the ship, we decided to go to the meeting place earlier and just waste our time there. When we meet our club president and other interested birders, we were told to go to LLPCHEA ahead of the group.


After the group have assembled, there was a short speech by Mike Lu and a short introduction by Mark Villa before we started birding.

We saw a lot fewer birds this time, but those kingfishers never fail to impress the group of newbie and oldie birders.

Common kingfisher

White collared kingfisher

Black crowned night heron

Before we left, we were treated to a nice view of the colorful sunset.

Astronomy in October

After weeks of cloudy sky, the rainy season is near its' end. At my place, I'm already getting some nice clear sky either during the day or night. Astronomy season is finally here.

October 18
I got home with a nice clear sky. Initially, I took my 15x70 bins out to scan the sky. After a few minutes, I couldn't hold the itch to image something. I took out my portable setup: a Canon SX120 digicam on an EQ-1 and start capturing the Andromeda galaxy, that's Messier 31 to number geeks. Then I saw Jupiter rising. It was already about 25 degrees from the horizon. So I took out my 102mm mak and set it up on a CG-4, find the target and start shooting. The seeing was still flaky at best, so I waited until the target reached 30 degrees. Then I took a few more clips. Not long after I started shooting, my batteries ran out of juice. I managed to collect these images.

October 22
The sky is clear again, but I have a lot of things to do, so I simply took a few moon shots from my Apex 127 mak to satisfy the astro fever.

Sun 2012-10-07

After a few months of cloudy sky and anti-astronomy weather, I was finally able to do some astro session. I initially thought the sky will turn cloudy later, but I was wrong. The warm sun stayed open the entire afternoon. I took a short peek at the sun, but found out that some sunspots are available for imaging, so I took these.

 Sunspot 1582

Sun with spots 1582 and 1585, plus another small one on the upper left near the edge of the disk.

I used my 102mm Skywatcher mak, EQ-3 and Canon Powershot A590 digicam to capture these images using afocal method.