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BAS member Akarsh, after a wait of 1.5 years, finally received his prestigeous 17.5" f/5 Discovery Dobsonian split-tube scope. It was just 2 days before the Messier Marathon scheduled on 28th! Since this was the scope's first light from a dark place, we obviously decided to keep it an object-marathon rather than confining to only Messiers.

Moving the monster did take some energy. This is no doubt in the top 3 of India's largest and optically finest amateur scopes, and probably the first Discovery around !

Sky condition was very bad in evening with thick haze slimming chances of clearing anytime, but it cleared soon. By night, the skies were all clear with some background illumination and close to ~6 Naked Eye Limiting Magnitude (NELM).

All objects are recollected by us from memory, not one is refered from star charts (except for ocassional position confirming).

There were initially 8-9 people taking their time and observing details taking 30-60 seconds and even more, for each object, then we remained only 3-4 later in the night taking our own time.

Bangalore Astronomical Society was invited for Conducting a workshop on “Galileoscope - Telescope Making” at SEDS India National Conference 2009 held on 28th Feb 2009 at VIT University, Vellore.

The event was planned about a month and half ago, with lots of discussing on the agenda and the event plan, finally we confirmed our participation. During our discussion we estimated about 45 students to be registered, but as the registrations were open for Galileoscope workshop with in a short period there were over 60 registered participants. About two weeks later we were surprised to see over 120 people registered, hitting maximum participants for any event during SINC 09.

Myself ( Naveen LN) with other BAS volunteer members Vivek Y, Vishwakeerthy, Achyut and Alex set our journey to Vellore. We planned for our activity such that each one would handle independently a group of students during the observation. I was completely concentrating on my presentation and demonstrations. This was the first time where BAS was representing at a national level conference and outside Karnataka.

Finally, a star party and quite a big one at that! The Bangalore Astronomical Society kickstarted it's proceedings for the International Year of Astronomy on the most ideal note possible. With the participant count touching 30, it turned out to be nearly seventy two hours of pure fun and healthy astonomy, in the pitch dark Mag 6.5 skies that Coorg provided us.

The Star party itself began with a formal round of introductions at 6:30PM on Saturday evening, with enthusiasm and anticipation running high on both the first timers and the erudite amateurs alike. The observing equipment for the trip included Amar's 20X100 giant binoculars mounted on a custom parallelogram mount, Naveen's 6" f/8 Equatorial, Shashank's 8" f/6 Equatorial among st many other smaller binoculars, laser pointers and misc accessories.