This time only 3 of us, Akarsh, me and the President of our
astronomy association had gone to our northern location with the
prime purpose of observing and doing some astrophotography,
piggyback. Both of us, Akarsh and me were supposed to learn it from our
President, who's' very experienced in this field. Also I wished to get the Comet Pojmanski
photographed by tracking.
The weather was very bad in the evening up to midnight. There was also
lots of light pollution. As a result no photography could
be done. So Akarsh and me went on with our usual work, observing.
The instrument was the president's 8" f/8 which produced fantastic
images and stars as pin-point.
Both of us started with the planetary nebula NGC 2438 in the
open cluster M46 (NGC 2437). I roughly knew which side of the open
cluster to look for so with very great difficulty could find a 10th
magnitude haze within the cluster. All of us saw it later. At night
it was the usual session with different types of objects, clusters
and galaxies. Akarsh finished the entire Virgo cluster (while I just
dozed off for some time) and observed around a total of 25 galaxies
there. Then both of us aimed mainly for some new globulars in the
Southern sky. And galaxies randomly here and there as well as in
Leo, Ursa Major etc. I saw only a total of around 18 new objects. Some other highlights were : two very faint
looking globulars in the same field of view, Pojmanski comet, 1-2
approximately 11.5 magnitude galaxies and very less meteors.
In the morning we waited for Pojmanski wanting to photograph
it. But the skies in east were so badly light-polluted that it
resembled the city sky. I wanted to find it with the telescope but the
ligh-pollution discouraged me in finding it. But still, somehow by moving here and there
in the nearby region as given in the finder chart, I came across it
with the telescope. It was superb even in lights. The coma was very
bright and this time the tail was around 1/4th the field of view of
eyepiece (1 degree). The last time I saw it, it was around 1/2 degree
long. Jupiter was one of the best
highlights ever. So good was the optics of the President's instrument that when the image was
steady, I could slightly make out the Red
Spot and another spot beside it !! I wanted to know what that tiny spot
was, around half the size of the Great Red Spot (GRS). And on top of that, the unevenness
(that they are not straight lines) in the two bands of Jupiter were
slightly made out as seen in photos. Also I could probably see another very thin band
just above the bottom band (that's near to the equator). Very few
bands near both the poles also could be seen. These observations
were made by both of us. (mostly these were not illusions).
After few days, I came to know that the unknown spot I had seen near to
the GRS was infact another new feature on Jupiter, unofficially called
Junior Red Spot. I had "discovered" a new feature on Jupiter.
We missed photographing Pojmanski this time. But anyway I hadn't lost
hope altogether. We had another comet 73/P Schwassmann Wachmann3
coming our way, we not knowing about the historic approach we were going
to witness. It was predicted to be much brighter in May reaching 3-4th
magnitude and visible throughout the night.
