Mess of Messiers!
Posted by admin | Filed under Messier Catalog, Z8
So it has been about one month since FedEx delivered my telescope. Factoring in moon brightness, cloud cover and a busy schedule, last night was the earliest opportunity to take the telescope out under completely dark skies and good seeing conditions. I had spent a couple hours in a kayak late in the afternoon yesterday so I was pretty tired and little sunburned. I debated the consequences and trouble of hauling my scope out into the country and almost decided to stay home. Today I am very happy I mustered the motivation to head out and do some star gazing.
So far this was the best telescope experience I have had to date and I was able to find a bunch of new Messier objects to add to our list. I left the house about 10:30pm and got home around 1:00am. I was so anxious to get out there that I had to turn back because I forgot my base! The base is important. It holds the telescope. Duh!
I won’t go into major detail here on the following objects. At any rate, here is a short list of each object observed last night for the first time by yours truly. I didn’t spend a ton of time observing each object due to how late it was getting. I sure learned a lot about locating these objects though.
Most impressive was the Ring Nebula (m57). It appeared like a faint smoke ring in the constellation Lyra. The Ring Nebula was once a star very similar to our own Sun that has exhausted all it’s primary fuel and has now expanded into a red giant. This will ultimately be the fate of our poor planet. Yay!
I don’t have much to add, factually speaking to any of these. All that can be said has been said. I will say though that I had an absolute BALL hunting down these new objects and I look forward to revisiting them. I think I need to start taking better field notes so I have something to refer to the next time I make an entry here. I suggest checking out the Ring Nebula if you ever have a chance. It was really cool! I know I compared it to a smoke ring, but for some reason it made me hungry for calamari.
As I mentioned above, this was my first opportunity to get out under completely clear and dark skies. Also my first chance to really view the Milky Way. I cannot describe in words how mindblowing it is to scan around the Milky Way with a wide field view. Whenever I hear a Carl Sagan impression it is always “Billions and Billions”. Sure, it’s funny. It’s fun to do your best Carl Sagan voice and say stuff like “Billions and Billions” but it wasn’t until I actually viewed the Milky Way through my telescope before I fully realized and appreciated this cliché. The field of view was literally strewn with thousands of tiny points of light in every direction. It’s such fun to just slowly scan around the star fields of our galactic neighborhood and put our own selves in that context. Where do we fit in? Are we so arrogant to believe that we are unique? Sometimes I have a hard time grasping the idea that I am a person standing on a rotating planet being hurled through space by gravity and living out a life so dependent upon a thousand cosmic variables. Modify any of these variables just a little and we wouldn’t be here.
How many tries does it take for life to take hold? How many tries does it take for intelligence to evolve from that life that has taken hold? Say you have a handful of 10 die. How many times do you throw these die before they all land on the same number? 1 thousand? 1 million? Throw these die enough times and eventually they will all land on the same number. We take life and this beautiful planet for granted. We think we are special and entitled. We make the mistake of assuming that this is all for us. I think we are lucky. We were dealt a royal flush on a cosmic scale. We are 1 in 100 million rolls of a handful of dice. Except the die that were rolled are 1000 sided dice the amount of die used in the roll are certainly much greater than a handful.
These are fun ideas to wrestle with. Simply asking them may be more important than answering them. If you have never seen the Pale Blue Dot excerpt from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos please invest five minutes of your life and watch the video below. Carl Sagan’s idea to turn Voyager around as it left the Solar System to snap a picture of Earth is possibly one of the best ideas any human being has ever had.
Clear Skies!
June 11th, 2010 at 11:13 pm
WOW! Cant wait to see it!