Are we alone? Impossible. Whenever I point my telescope to the Virgo-Cluster this is the first thing which comes to my mind. Tonight I tuned in the Interstellar soundtrack on youtube 🙂 When the first frame came in I was getting a strange feeling which was somewhere between happiness, admiration, worriedness, abjection and fear and a cold shiver ran down my back.
When I look at the image I see all the galaxies. But it is still very hard – probably impossible – to imagine what that actually means. It is fantastic! And this image is only a very very small region of the night sky. So next time you are annoyed because you missed the bus or the train – take yourself a short moment and remember how small and irrelevant your problem might be compared to what is out there. To me this is sometimes very helpful 🙂
 | Date | 2015/05/22 |
 | Location | Böblingen / Germany |
 | Object | Virgo-Cluster |
 | Camera | Atik383L+ |
 | Guiding | yes, QHY5-II Mono via OAG |
 | Telescope | f/5 (F=1000mmm) GSO Newtonian telescope |
 | Barlow lens | none |
 | Mount | EQ6Syntrek |
 | Cooling | -15°C |
 | Luminance | 11x, 600s, bin: 1x1 |
 | Red | 8x, 150s, bin: 2x2 |
 | Green | 8x, 150s, bin: 2x2 |
 | Blue | 8x, 150s, bin: 2x2 |
 | Dark | 5x |
 | Flat | 10x |
 | Total exposure | ~2h8min. |
On wikipedia you can find a fantastic image of the Virgo-Cluster which shows even more (much more) galaxies than my image. The seeing with my f/5 GSO Newtonian (F=1000mm) was around 3″ – so this could have been better.
Clear skies!
Last updated: July 23, 2022 at 12:54 pm