Astrophotography: A Window to the Cosmos

Nearly two years ago, my fascination with astronomy ignited and I found myself outside every night observing the heavens. The number of stars you can see in the rural parts of south-central Pennsylvania on a clear, moonless night number in the thousands, tens of thousands as a matter of fact. My two or three pound brain was just starting to digest the fact that there were tens of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, and our star, the Sun, was just one of them. I recall a feeling that I was small and insignificant in the presence of so many stars. It was then when I took up my DLSR camera and pointed it up at the sky that I truly saw how big and rich the universe is.

Mike Mowen

This was my very first photo I took back in September 2012, not a bad first attempt I might add. I opened the iris up all the way and set my shutter speed to 30 seconds. This picture does a decent job at representing the view that my eyes were seeing that night. It may be safe to estimate the number of stars in this photo to a couple thousand.

           

Jupiter is the brightest object in the picture and the Pleiades star cluster is right above Jupiter.

This is one of my favorite pictures I’ve taken. You see two stunning objects in the photo.

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

The first is the planet Jupiter, the brightest object in the picture. It is the largest planet in our solar system and most famous for its Great Red Spot, which has roughly the same circumference as Earth. The size of Jupiter’s diameter is 11 times greater than the Earth, or in other words, it would take 11 Earths lined up in a row to measure out the diameter of the gas giant. Using a telescope or a good pair of binoculars you can easily make out the many moons of Jupiter, including the frozen moon Europa, which is thought to be a likely candidate to harbor life.

NASA, ESA, AURA/Caltech, Palomar Observatory

The second object in the picture is M45, or the Pleiades star cluster. The nine brightest stars were named after the seven sisters of Greek mythology and their parents, thus giving the cluster the other name, Seven Sisters. The Pleiades cluster contains over 1,000 stars. Looking at this object through a telescope and seeing hundreds of stars is one of the most enjoyable sights in the winter night skies.

Here is a rather poor picture of Jupiter that I took with my camera shooting through my scope. To get the best pictures of planets and other planetary objects it is best to use a camera or scope on an equatorial mount so you can match the Earth’s rotation and follow the object. Regardless this picture gives you the basic idea of Jupiter; the two major brown bands and, if you look close enough you can make out the Great Red Spot.

This picture of our Moon is a personal favorite of mine. To get the shot I simply shot through my telescope. Craters from impacts millions of years ago have scarred the surface of the moon. Every time I look up at the moon I imagine the three-man crew of Apollo 11 walking around it’s surface back in 1969.

Neil Armstrong was the first member of our species to place a foot on another surface outside of the Earth; followed closely by fellow Apollo 11 crewmen, Buzz Aldrin. As Armstrong’s boot touched the moon’s surface, he spoke one of the most famous words in human history, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”. These words, along with the success of the Apollo program, inspired our nation as well as the next generation of scientists.

Mike Mowen

Here is a picture from my attempts at using exposures longer than 30 seconds. This picture had an exposure of 55 seconds and it brought out some very nice details of the lighter part of the famous Milky Way Galaxy band. It is important to point out that every spec and smudge of light is a star. The milky grey “cloud” that go across the picture is a mixture of millions of stars and gasses that make up that particular part of our galaxy.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

There is another object in this photo that is worth mentioning, the tiny disc of light in the top region of the picture. It is our galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. This galaxy is located 2.5 million light-years from us. When you look at the Andromeda Galaxy through a telescope or with the naked eye, you are seeing the galaxy as it was 2.5 million years ago because that is how long it took the light to travel to Earth. It is estimated to contain 200-400 billion star systems, each of them containing planets. The light from the galaxy in this picture is actually just the central region that is a concentration of stars numbering in the billions. When photographed through a large telescope using longer exposures the galaxy would appear six times as wide as the full Moon.

I’ve often imagined an observer on a planet orbiting a star located in the Andromeda Galaxy observing our galaxy and pondering whether or not there were life forms living throughout it. Although, the observer would be looking at our galaxy as it was 2.5 million years ago, when our early ape-like, Australopithecus africanus was roaming the Earth on two feet.

Andromeda is coming right for our Milky Way Galaxy as 300,000 km/s and the two galaxies are expected to collide in about 3.75-4.5 billion years. 

This winter constellation is a favorite among many stargazers and astrophotographers. It is the constellation of Orion. It is one of the easiest to see in the winter skies and there is a special object located in Orion’s sword that is particularly special, the Orion Nebula. It is considered a stellar nursery where new stars are being formed from dust, gasses and other materials. Our sun was once formed in a nebula 4.6 billion years ago.

Astrophotography is a window to the cosmos. Though we have come far in our understanding of the universe by using observations made by scientists and amateur astronomers, “we know more and more about less and less” as the late Christopher Hitchens used to say in debates. There is still much to learn about the cosmos and our place in it.

To conclude, dear reader, I wanted to share the words of the man who has inspired millions of people and is currently playing a role in my life right now in my quest for understanding the universe. The picture below was taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on July 19, 2013. The picture shows our planet, Earth, as it looks from the vantage point near Saturn. You may have seen the famous 1972 "Pale Blue Dot" photo taken by Voyage 1 that Carl Sagan wrote about in, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. It is now that I will leave you with one of the most famous passages ever written in science, Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot. Thanks for reading!

NASA/JPL-Caltech

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” - Carl Sagan