Saturn!

I think I've mentioned somewhere in my blog before that I am in the Astronomy Society. The society meets every Saturday night. If the sky is clear, we'll proceed to the observatory （picture on the left) for some sky gazing. Well, as you might have guessed, given UK's kind of weather, it is not often that we get a clear sky, chances are even lower when you restrict it to just Saturday nights. Most of the time, we just make do with partly cloudy skies.

So it is a very rare opportunity last Saturday when the sky was completely clear of clouds. I had actually planned to attend a Chinese New Year Gala concert at York's Opera House, but a clear sky on a Saturday night is probably rarer here in York than CNY, so I decided it is not a chance to be missed. And boy, did I made the right choice.

First of all, the society's telescope wasn't working quite well, so the Astro Soc chairperson decided that we will use the main observatory telescope, which is several times more powerful. It seems that the professor in charge of the scope is quite particular about people going up to the observatory, so usually we just make do with the society's scope, placed outside the observatory. But last Saturday was just too clear a sky to observe the rules! But not to worry. The chairperson is a student of the professor, and is trained in using the main scope, so it's not like we are going up there and messing things.

And we were not disappointed. Not only is the main scope more powerful, it is also controlled by a computer, so all you need to do is to click on the object you want to observe and presto! the computer will point the scope in the correct direction.

So the chairperson brought us on a tour of the most interesting sights of the night sky: Crab Nebula, Andromeda Galaxy, Seven Sisters, Betelgeuse, Sirus etc. But the most magnificent of all is of course Saturn. It is really fascinating to see Saturn surrounded by its rings, and its moons. It looks something like the picture below, which was taken a few years back by the society. The angle of the rings was different this time round, and we were also able to see two of Saturn's moon. And of course, seen with your very own eyes, the image is much sharper.

Another pretty sight is what is called an open cluster. It is a group of faint stars which you can't see with the naked eye. So there is a patch of dark sky there, and you are thinking "ok, so why are you pointing the scope there?". Then you look through the scope, and you see so many points of light that look like jewels shining in the dark. Really amazing! The picture on the right, from Wikipedia, shows something like what we saw, but through the scope with your own eyes, it is much more fascinating.

In contrast, the nebulas and the galaxies are rather disappointing. They appear as blur blobs. One reason, I supposed, is because York suffer from light pollution like all urban centres, so the sky is really not dark enough to observe these faint objects. And of course the pictures we usually see in astronomy magazine are usually filtered to produce those sharp, magnificient colours. Through the scope, they all look more or less black and white, with reddish or bluish hues at best.

What a night! What a unforgettable 年初三. Now I know how the early astronomers felt when they see through the scope for the first time!