Messier Marathon - 12/13th March 2016

Messier Marathon 

12th March 2016- 6 pm to  13th  morning - 6 am - 12 hours  non stop skywatch

Telescopes used - 11 inch Celestron  Schmidt–Cassegrain (computerised) C11 , 4 inch Celestron Nextstar Maksutov Cassegrain  (computerised) and 4 inch Orion Reflector 

Six of us - Sakthivel, Anand, Deivaprakash, Annamalai, Manivannan & Gnanaraj - spent 12 hours of non stop skywatching  with three telescopes  on a vast terrace of a building  at Purna Vidya Foundation situated at   Molapalayam ,Pooluvapatti -  25 kms away from the light polluted skies of Coimbatore . 

It was a well planned Messier Marathon but started with cloudy skies with streaks of lightning and thunder.It was raining in Kovaipudur and Podanur. We are used to all this.. We started setting up the scopes and went on with our plan for the night. As usual nature was kind enough to open up the skies for us. We went on non stop  till early morning twilight the next day. 

Clouds were everywhere and seeing was not steady . Still we could go on and saw almost 59 Messier objects (Galaxies,Nebulae, Globular and Open star clusters etc). There was aforecast of Eta Virginids Meteor shower that night. But we could see only a few streaking through. Both Jupiter and Saturn were great even though there was turbulence. We could crank up magnification upto 350 times with that wonderful  Badder Hyperion eyepiece for Saturn and  what a sight to see! Even the center part of Ring nebula was resolved. The giant globular star cluster ( a mass of 5 million stars) Omega Centauri was a blast ! More than all we have seen almost all the must see galaxies and galaxy clusters in the constellation of Virgo. These are the prize catches of the night . Hard to see galaxies otherwise and they  were just detectable objects in the big 11 inch scope.   That big 11 inch computerised  scope developed snags and went out of calibration a few times. But Prakash kind of tamed it and then after 12 midnight the scope never stopped for a moment . It was a great night and all six of us returned with our hearts full of starlight ! 

Messier objects: http://www.seasky.org/astronomy/astronomy-messier.html
Omega Centauri: http://earthsky.org/clusters-nebulae-galaxies/omega-centauri-milky-ways-prize-star-cluster
Virgo - galaxies : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgo_Cluster