Let me explain: For my *cough* significant *cough* birthday, my Dearly Beloved indulged me with a recent whim: a brand new Telescope. Nothing too fancy, I am a dilettante and a newcomer, not an expert or an obsessive. Nonetheless, the Celestron NexStar 102SLT is a fine piece of kit, a 4.5" refractor with a smashing computer-driven mount, making finding and locking on to interesting things a matter of calibrate, select from menu, press button and observe.
However, as always there has been a problem and in this case it's environmental. Apart from one try-out after it arrived (which mainly proved how well the calibration and tracking worked), either the weather's been overcast or I've not been around to try it out.
Thus it was that when I observed at about 21:00 last night that there was a bright moon and nearly clear skies, the glass of white wine inside me convinced me it was well past time to take up station in the back garden in shorts and sandals and see what I can see.
My preferred target would have been a planet - I'm dying to see Saturn's rings or as many of Jupiter's moons as possible - but the plane of the ecliptic is on the street side of our house, where the bright sodium lights & obscuring neighbour houses together with a minimal sense of decorum prevented me setting up. Besides, at this time of year Saturn's setting pretty much with the sun so I had no chance.
This left me with the mostly-Northern sky to observe, and thus deep-field objects rather than anything in the solar system. Stars are fine, but I'm not experienced enough to navigate the skies myself or to particularly tell the difference between them. So I used the "Tour" function on the 'scope to find me something a bit more than a point-light-source to look at.
I was rewarded with a l-o-n-g list of nebulae and galaxies above the horizon to choose from. I was pre-warned from my reading of the manuals etc that observing such far away objects by eye with such an amateur scope was unlikely to produce great results. However, I gamely selected the Andromeda Galaxy, waited as the 'scope slewed around, and put my eye to the objective.
I was rewarded with a smudge. A dim smudge, with a few pin-point stars around it. My natural conclusion was a spot on the lens, or perhaps a passing cloud. But slewing around, then back made the smudge re-appear, and keep the same position.
And here's the religious part of the experience: I saw a galaxy, but it requires faith on my part to believe that that dim smear between a bunch of stars is the light resulting from about a trillion stars 2.5 million light years away, rather than some sort of aberration of the 'scope or the heavens.
Intrigued and a little humbled by the experience - my own puny ageing weak eyes, gazing myopically on photons older than my species - I tried again. M2 was the same, the Dumbbell Nebula even weaker. Finally I tried the Ring Nebula which was far above the house.
If you google for it, you'll find pictures that look like this:
(Picture copyright NASA, taken from Wikipedia)
Whereas what I saw through my 7mm 72x magnification view looked more like this:
(Screenshot from Stellarium, post-processed to simulate actual view)
That smudge in the middle there is a ring about 1/2 a light year in diameter, 1,400 light years from here and the remnants of an exploded red giant star. Nerd that I am, I find the fact that I can see anything at all quite inspiring, as with Andromeda the implications of what I was able to see with my own eye are far, far more impressive and humbling than the image in any way suggests.
In many ways the experience - far from being a disappointment - gave me a new appreciation of the work of astronomers. Before the age of photography, this was all they ever saw and yet the star maps of even two centuries ago contain wonderfully detailed observations. The leap of intuition to go from "there's a smudge in the sky" to "That's another Galaxy, with more stars than our own, inconceivably far away" blows me away.
I don't have the time, inclination nor (I strongly suspect) the intellect to get there myself, therefore I am in a position of having to have faith that what I was looking at was as described; I will never be in a position to prove this for myself.
But nonetheless it was a rewarding experience I look forward to repeating...
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