Last Saturday, Lahore Astronomical Society took its members to 'Changa Manga' which is one of the largest man-made forest in the world. It has much better sky than the heavily light polluted conditions here in lahore and just an hour drive from my city.
On Saturday 22 March, i left home for Changa Manga forest at 10:30am. My solar telescope, Celestron mount and power tank, Laptop bag and projector were in safely put in my trunk. On my way i picked up Behzad, Mateen and Mr. Raza of tourism department who actually made our booking of the resort in the forest.
When we reached there, other members had just arrived. I informed them of our plan: First i will present a keynote lecture on the sun and halpha viewing, then we will all have lunch which will be followed by the solar viewing session.
The presentation went quite well.. lots of information was shared and many interesting questions were asked. In the observation session, many of us were the first to see through the halpha telescope. I distributed Charlie Bates' Solar Glasses to everyone there.. also to the staff of the resort.
For night time session we had four telescopes and some binoculars.. saw quite a few galaxies, clusters and usual planets. Clouds came in, as predicted, around 01:00am and we went to our rooms for a good sleep.
These are the pictures taken from many members of the astronomy society:
