A Night at Ta Xua

These are a guide's notes from a trial trip in early May. Participants' names have been omitted.

Seven in the evening

Cloud covered the ridge. From the homestay porch we could see only each other's torches and a flat grey without depth. One guest asked whether we should turn in early. I said that at Ta Xua the cloud usually sits below us and often shifts once the sun is fully down, but no one can promise anything in advance.

We drank tea, checked the telescope and the mount again, and switched to red light. It is the dull part of the work every observer knows: careful preparation for something that may not come.

Half past nine

The wind changed. The cloud began to drain into the valley like an ebbing tide. First came Vega in the north-east, then the Big Dipper tilting over the northern range. Once the cloud lay fully below us it became a pale carpet, covering the lights of the villages in the valley. The sky above was clearly darker than the night before.

We walked up to Dinosaur Ridge, about twenty minutes on foot. Nobody said much. At that height the wind and our steps on the rock were the only sounds left.

Midnight

Scorpius had fully risen in the south-east, orange Antares at its heart. Behind it the Milky Way thickened into star clouds broken by dark lanes of dust. I turned the telescope to the Lagoon Nebula, a faint glow crossed by a dark band. One guest looked for a long time and said he had expected the colours from photographs. I explained that in the dark the human eye barely registers colour in faint objects; colour is what a camera gathers over many minutes of exposure. He kept looking.

Two in the morning

The galactic core had cleared the southern range and stood about thirty degrees high. On a phone, an SQM app gave a reading of around 21.6 at the zenith. A phone reading is only indicative, but it agreed with our Bortle 3 estimate for the site.

Some people took photographs. Some simply lay on the groundsheet. One said the last time he had seen the Milky Way was as a child in his home village, before the street lights arrived.

Five in the morning

The east grew pale. The sea of cloud was still there, now tinted pink by the dawn. We walked down in silence, tired, and perhaps a little changed from the evening before.