M 81 and M 82
Deep Sky
The image this week is one that Tim Doucette took in his large telescope at the Deep Sky Eye Observatory in Quinan, which he sent to me after our session there earlier this week, and I processed it in Photoshop to bring out some more detail.
The tour at the Observatory was a lot of fun, some 30 retired teachers heard a great lecture, then a guided tour of the stars, and finally a look through three telescopes, each aimed at a different object in space and manned by one of Tim’s assistants. We also got a tour of Tim’s main telescope, which is what the camera is mounted on that took the image for this week.
I’ve been an astronomy fan since my childhood, a true “space age” baby, as I grew up in the era of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions leading up to the first moonwalk. My Dad purchased a telescope kit from Edmunds Scientific for us to put together when I was 10 years old, a scope I still have, and when I retired from the School Board in 2010, they gave me a new telescope which I love to use. With our family place in Florida, I've had the opportunity to tour Kennedy Space Center a number of times, seen 3 shuttle launches up close and countless rocket launches as our condo is downwind from many launches of rockets like the Space X satellite systems which launch regularly.
Getting to see what Tim has put together and the session he gives was very interesting to me and has indeed caused me to have a bit of a renewed fervor in using my equipment. In chatting with Tim afterward, I also realized that I hadn’t done a lot of nighttime landscapes recently, something I also enjoy.
The image this week then is of two Messier objects – Bodes Galaxy and the Cigar Galaxy, M81 and M82 respectively as taken with Tim’s telescope and processed by me. An incredible experience, and I highly recommend this as a “field trip” worth taking! - our Dark Skies here are well worth the effort to see!
I'm going to take a break from the blog for the month of June, but if you follow my Facebook page, you'll still find the Daily Image Project, and it will become quite clear in a week or so why the break from the blog. Have a great June and the blog will return on the 4th of July!
