The Astronomical League of the Philippines, in cooperation with the management of SM City -Fairview through the efforts of Mr. Bong Flores , had a second round of stargazing session at the parking lot of SM-Fairview last February 22nd. Among the ALPers who were present to help out were James Kevin Ty, Edmund Rosales, Alice Villa-Real, Allen Yu, Rich Pijuan,  Emma Catherine Flores, Irving Raymundo, Hans Gideon Cerdenia,  Michael John Lopez, Rafael Lunar, Mac Libid and Lala Alcala and friend Sandy Ebrada.

The session got started at 5:00pm at the Activity Center of SM Fairview with a pre-orientation of what to observe for the night and as well as a brief introduction of the star of the night, the ringed planet Saturn.  The orientation ended at around 5:45pm and ALPers took a break to have some light dinner to prepare setting up their scopes at around 6:45pm.

James brought along ALP's 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope (SCT) on fork equatorial mount , Alice brought along her Nexstar 5"SCT and Orion ST-80 short tube refractor , Edmund brought his Celestron C8 on Vixen GP equatorial mount and Allen with his Skywatcher 6" reflector on EQ-4 equatorial mount.

They started out with the ringed planet Saturn and the view was awesome as the students were awed by its beauty and 3 dimensional appearance.  Later, the ST-80 refractor was pointed at Saturn at low power revealing the planet together with the Beehive star cluster.   Orion Nebula was also very good and show a lot of details on its structure. Pleiades star cluster also had a good exposure as the sky at the parking lot was a bit dark to show the star cluster in all its beauty under low power.

The session ended at around 9:45pm when clouds started covering the sky and the group called it a night and were looking forward to February 24 session again at SM City- Fairview.

 

For more images of this activity, please click here.