Starry Night

Tonight, I went to the Joshua Tree Astronomy Arts Theater for the Messier Marathon event. This essentially consists of viewing the 110 astronomical objects found and documented by the famous French astronomer, Charles Messier, in the 18th century. There were telescopes that we could look through, but they were nothing like the one that was being used to project the objects. This thing was amazing -- it's a combination of a telescope and a camera with an extremely sensitive sensor, and the images we were able to see were awesome. There is no stargazing like this anywhere else in the world. Anyway, it was really cold!!! I was the last one to leave, and we had hit 56 objects. Everyone gave up (including the organizers -- we all went home).

This is Jupiter (live image) and a film we watched about the Mt. Wilson Observatory before the "Marathon" began.

This is the crab nebula -- just two different color schemes to try to bring out the best image.

Orion nebula -- the first image is less "exposed" than the second. What's cool is that you start to see, with a longer exposure time, more of the nebula, which you otherwise wouldn't know was there.

This is some star cluster which I do not remember the name of.

This is the cigar galaxy (seriously). It's nearly 12 million lightyears away from Earth!

This was a godsend. Once all the other people who came out for the Marathon wimped out, I got to hang out with the astronomy people running the show. And they had this propane heat thing. Awesome.

I don't remember what this was called. But I think it's a spiral galaxy -- you can see that it's spinning counterclockwise, because of its "spiral arms".

So, this was a really cool (cold!) night. We saw lots of things that were really extraordinary (including Thor's Helmet and the Horse Nebula) that I did not bother to photograph because it wouldn't have looked like much on my camera. And who wants to look at 56 of these things anyway?