A little space adventure with a friend in Nottingham

While I was up in Nottingham I caught up with a friend of mine that is into astrophotography (I mean, who isn’t) and needless to say we spent 4 hours in the back yard gazing at the universe through his telescope.

I cannot express the joy and amazement when I saw the Moon, Venus, Jupiter and some globular cluster up close. To see this black dot cross over Jupiter only to realize that it was one of its moons, words cannot express what I felt.

It does have an effect on you seing the shimmer of our atmosphere blurring the moon while it slowly descended out of sight, not to memtion being able to see it from so up close. If I had moeny to spare I would totally buy the kit and set camp for pretty much the rest of my life capturing the wonders of our beautiful universe :)

The joy that I felt in capturing M81 on camera was surreal. My brain still can't belive that from a backyard we managed to capture the light of galaxies that are 20 million light years away!

The credit to the photograph goes to Daniel Gaussen as he knew how to find it and how to calibrate the telescope and later at overlaying the multiple 2 minutes exposures into a sigle compressed image but the edeting is mine :)

Astrophotography is a beautifully humbling profession as with each shot you're capturing a glimpse of home, the mighty universe!

To me the image of M81 captures the insanity of our society. What are we doing? Why do we run to pursue money, it makes no sense! Why have we chosen this type of life here on Earth? When I look up at the sky I feel a familiar connection, similar to a child looking up at its parents. It is a beautiful and humbling feeling, one that cannot allow you to make sense of what we are doing to ourself and to this hospitable planet.

We should be grateful for the abundance of our habitat, not greedy to dig more out of it.