Shangri La, Muscat, Oman Observations – Wednesday 3 October into Thursday 4 October, 2012

3 Oct

Location: Barr Al Jissa Shangri La Hotel, Muscat, Oman
Conditions: Clear
Equipment: Celestron Skymaster 15×50 binoculars
Highlights: Jupiter, Orion, M42 Orion Nebula, Trapezium

We left the desert and spent a day exploring Wadi Bani Khalid. We swam in the clear freshwater pools of the canyon up in the mountains. We wouldn’t need to visit Wild Wadi back in Dubai after this. I crawled down into the Mukhal cave with my headtorch and before long was quite deep within the cave where it was very hot and dark. Turning a corner and taking care to be able to trace my route back, I could hear running water. I headed towards it for a few minutes and it got louder but I never saw the waterfall that’s supposedly in there. I was conscious that A was waiting for me outside and didn’t want her worrying so I headed back.
It was over a three hour drive back to Muscat and with some ~~fun~~ stress with the traffic we finally arrived at the Shangri La, Barr Al Jissah well after dark.
I had high hopes for this as a decent place for some stargazing. Before we’d headed out to Oman I’d had a discussion with somebody on Stargazers Lounge that suggested it was a good site. The resort is quite isolated, in it’s own grounds, some way South of Muscat. We had a seaview room so when we arrived there were dark skies out over the sea to the East.

12:48 After a late dinner I went out on the balcony and set the binoculars up on the tripod. The moon was out, about 3-4 days past full but very high so almost out of sight from the balcony. It did wash out the sky a bit but looking east there was no orange glow of light pollution. As I’ve done every evening I’ve been able to on this trip, I took a look at Jupiter and made a quick sketch of it’s moons.

It was interesting this evening and I needed to use SkySafari+ again to identify and locate moons. Io was in front and on the edge of the disk of Jupiter. I couldn’t make it out individually but there did appear to be a slight notch to the disk. It was hard to be sure if this was being caused by the shadow of Io on the disk or was just an artefact of the fact that the disk is very bright. It might have been due to a bit of flare or radial spiking. I get that sometimes due, I think, to my contact lenses.

12:55 Orion was up and on it’s side.

M42, the Orion Nebula was clearly visible as a smudge to the naked eye. It showed up well in the binoculars and seemed to surround a couple of the brighter stars. One of these brighter stars was actually the open cluster known as the Trapezium, although I was unable to resolve that to individual stars in the bins.
Observing M42, the Orion Nebula means another Messier Object spotted, taking my tally up to 8/110.