27th May, was a moonless and nearly cloudless night, made the conditions more than just favorable for observation. So, the members of the astronomy club planned to have a night long observation session. But the location was not the usual one: SAC rooftop, instead we all went to a location far away from city lights, about 22km from the campus.
A group of 15 highly enthusiastic students left the campus at around 9pm by tempo. Even when we were on the way to Shobhan Mandir, the sky had turned dark enough for the Milky Way to be visible clearly as a hazy white band sprawled across the sky. In about an hour, we were at our destination, a quite, dark location, miles away from city lights and pollution, with awesomely clear view of the heavens!
First of all we searched for a suitable location for observation, which turned out to be a field. Soon we started to settle down. Within half an hour, we had the telescope set up and started observation. The clear skies gave us a spectacular view of some of the nebulas and galaxies. At various points of time throughout the night, clouds did try to play spoilsport, but not for long and we were able to do quite a lot of observing. We observed Sombrero Galaxy, Lagoon nebula, Trifid nebula, Ring Nebula, Andromeda Galaxy, M4,M13, M21 and M23. We even saw Ursa Major and Cassiopeia constellation together which is not visible from campus sky .After sometime, some of us decided to try our hands at astrophotography and we were able to get a few nice shots of the sky. We had taken the pics of ursa major,Polaris, Spica and Arcturus, Saggitarius and Scorpio when the battery of the camera got fully discharged. Soon enough, the sky began to light up and we were able to have a view of rising moon, jupitar, mars and venus. Now it was time to pack up. We also had a look at rising sun from the tempo. So, happy with the results, we set off back to IITK, full of exciting memories of the previous night.
