The Baguio Astronomy Enthusiasts held their first Deep Sky Dive Camp for the International Dark Sky Week last April 26-27. The BAE is a regional extension of the Manila Street Astronomers volunteer outreach community, and has been mostly focused on conducting free telescope viewing events in urban spaces. The camp is one of the opportunities that we wanted to give for the members to explore deep-sky targets that we would not otherwise be able to show in our usual venues.
Our selected venue was located in one of the peaks of Puguis, La Trinidad, Benguet and was near forested areas giving relative darkness and atmospheric transparency. There were periods of overcast skies in the early evening, but the sky eventually cleared allowing us to view and photograph open clusters, globular clusters, nebulae, planetary nebulae, galaxies, and some stars and the Cygnus loop. We also talked about some ethnoastronomy by describing how some of the constellations we observed are perceived by different cultures, and how they used them as seasonal markers.