How I took 6" to Philippine Skies

by Paul LeFevre

I had been preparing for a Christmas trip to the Philippines for well over six months. I was determined to take advantage of the Southern skies observing opportunities while there, so the most work preparing came in building a six-inch Dobsonian reflector that I could carry on the airplane flight with me. The scope was finished in November, and with high hopes I took off on Sunday December 12th for a long trip.

The trip started off well on two counts -- first, my home-built "Travelscope" sailed through security checks, size checks, and weighings with no problems at all! Second, during the 16-hour flight from San Francisco to Manila, I spent hours at the airplane's window watching the Southern Cross rise above the horizon while Geminids whizzed by brightly and frequently. I had a good feeling about this trip...

Our final destination was Tagum, a city of about 100,000 people some 60 kilometers outside the large city of Davao on the island of Mindanao. Twenty-two hours of plane flights and layovers after leaving San Francisco, we arrived in Davao and made the drive to Tagum, where my wife's parents live. I had been to the Philippines eight times before, but never before with a telescope of any kind, and not since becoming astronomically-aware. Arriving in Tagum, I set opened up and assembled the Travelscope, collimated it, and checked it out...it survived the trip with nary a scratch and was ready to go!

When darkness fell, I could hardly wait to get outside. Setting up the scope in the backyard, I watched as the sky faded and stars and planets began to appear. Jupiter was the first thing visible -- but not at the southerly spot I was used to! I was directly overhead, crossing nearly right at the zenith. Orion began to rise in the east, and it too was at the mid-point north to south, and looked upside down! This was going to take some getting used to...

Another thing that took getting used to was the conditions outside. I'm used to bundling up and many layers of clothing at the higher-elevation locations in California where I normally observe, and still being cold. In Tagum, I was only wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and was sweating like crazy in the 80-degree heat and 90% plus humidity. As it darkened, though, I could see it was going to be worth it. The most obvious visual difference was in the steadiness of the skies. There was virtually no twinkling on any of the stars I could see, and the air hung still above me with no hint of a breeze. There was also no light pollution that I could detect at all, and as the sky darkened it turned an inky black that I had never seen before. The combination of dark sky and stillness gave an eerie three-dimensional impression of vast depth to the sky.

With the air so still, I started off looking at Jupiter and Saturn. I have never before had such fine views of these gaseous wonders! I was able to easily work between 200X and 300X, and saw cloud details on Jupiter and ring patterns on Saturn that were only hinted at before. I could swear I saw color and hints of surface detail on Io and Europa as well. Water vapor in the air lowered the transparency just a bit, but I would still rate it 8 out of 10, and seeing as at least 9 out of 10.

I started going after deep-sky targets at M42 in Orion, intending to work my way south from there. I wound up staying at M42 much longer than I planned, however, as the detail visible in the great nebula was outstanding due to the sky conditions! My wife, who has seen M42 from San Francisco and environs many times in my scope, came out and took a look...her comment was, "It looks like the pictures of it do now!" My feelings exactly.

Over the course of the next three weeks, when weather and the moon allowed, I worked the constellations south from Orion down through Sirius and Puppis, then into uncharted (for me!) territory in Carina, Volans, Dorado, Vela, Centaurus, Crux, and Musca. A full list of objects and descriptions is at the end of this report. Since I had never even seen most of these constellations before, let alone tried to find deep-sky targets in them, I worked rather slowly and methodically, savoring every discovery and spending lots of time at each object I found to burn them into my memory.

Omega Centauri is an awesome sight whenever you can see it -- high in the sky from a wonderful dark site with great seeing, it is absolutely incredible! Straggling stars filled nearly the entire field on my 32mm eyepiece, and with higher powers the number of resolved stars increased and flooded the view. Even naked-eye I could see that it was not a star, but a fuzzy ball. Having it high above horizon haze gave a wonderful clear view.

I could spend months studying the area around Crux -- the Southern Cross. This bright little constellation nestled inside Centaurus is a wonder of clusters, nebulae, and multiple stars, all sparkling with color.

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are visible as fuzzy patches to the naked eye, and contain some nice telescopic objects as well. My favorite, in the LMC, was the Tarantula Nebula -- it puts M42 to shame, and has wonderful sweeping dark lanes that swirl through it, and clusters of young blue stars that burst from the center. The SMC is equally appealing, and just below it the huge cluster NGC 104 (47 Tucanae), while not quite as impressive as Omega Centauri, still puts on a show that even M13 can't match.

Where I spent most of my time, however, was in Carina. Sweeping this large constellation with binoculars shows the large Eta Carina nebula clearly, and many other fields of nebulosity and star clusters worth exploring. Full details are below.

The richest experience I had on my trip, however, was not sweeping Carina or discovering the Magellanic clouds...near the full moon of December 22nd, we went to a beach resort near the end of Davao Gulf where it opens out onto the Celebes Sea. Our first night there, with the moon up and nearly full, I brought out the Travelscope to spend some time with Jupiter and Saturn on the beach. Because of the upcoming holiday, the resort was nearly full, and the beach pretty packed even at night. My odd assemblage of wood and aluminum on the beach soon drew a few people over to see what was going on, so I obligingly started showing Saturn, Jupiter, and the moon to the curious onlookers. Now, this is something I've done dozens of times at Fremont Peak and other places, but the reaction at a remote beach in the Philippines was amazing...the usual disbelief, then oohs and ahhs were followed by people running down the beach to gather friends and bring them over, and before long I literally had a crowd of over 100 people gathered around waiting patiently to get their turn at the eyepiece, and peppering me with questions while they were waiting! My Visayan (the local dialect of Tagalog spoken on Mindanao) is not all that hot when it comes to scientific or astronomical terms, but between my poor Visayan and my visitors' poor English, we somehow were able to understand each other. I answered questions about distances to the planets, why Saturn has rings, are those really moons around Jupiter, why are there so many craters on the moon, how do you build a telescope, how much does one cost, where are the rest of the planets...on and on. My new friends brought over beer, rice, fish, mangos, and other delights, and wouldn't let me pay for any of them. When clouds finally brought the observing to a halt at about 3:00 AM, we all sat around and talked until sunrise about the age of the universe, the vast distances in the cosmos, and the meaning of life. It was a magical night that I will never forget.

Just after noon the next day, a man approached me in the resort lobby with two young children in tow. He asked if I would be showing the planets again that night -- he worked the night shift at the resort, and instead of sleeping had walked home (over an hour each way) to bring his two children back with him so they could see the wonderful things he had seen the night before. It was an honor to put his two kids first in line so they could get what will probably be the only chance in their lives to see Saturn's rings for themselves that night -- a night which went much like the first.

My three weeks in the Philippines passed all too quickly, and soon it was time to return home. I had planned for this trip and built a special telescope for purely selfish reasons -- to see southern sky wonders for myself. I achieved most of my personal objectives, but I also learned an important lesson...the most gratifying part of my trip was not what I could see, but came from what I could show to others.

I can't wait to go back!

Observing Notes

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