Astronomers are some of the luckiest people in the world because they get to work in some of the most beautiful places in the world! Imagine going to work each night and seeing the beauty of the starry sky above you, and getting paid to study it! I thought of that again today when I saw this image from the European Southern Observatory at La Silla in Chile. The folks at this site have amazing views of the sky nearly year-round. This view is of the early spring skies (southern hemisphere) taken on September 14, and features a radio dish with the stars shining through it. In the distance is the 3.6-meter telescope. And, arching over the scene is the Milky Way in all its splendor.
There’s something very primal about being under a night sky like this. I’ve only experienced it a few times in my life: for eight nights on Mauna Kea in 1996, a 3-week visit to Peru in 1986, and a 3-week cruise around South America in 2001 as an astronomy lecturer onboard an ocean liner. Each time I’d step out under the dark skies and feel as if the skies were about to swallow me up! It’s an eerie feeling, yet once you get used to it, you almost feel as if you’ve come home to the stars.
Whether you work under the stars as an astronomer or simply enjoy them as a hobby or pastime, the night time skies are a treasure to protect and enjoy!
A long time ago I wrote a planetarium show called More Than Meets The Eye about all the things you can see in the sky if you look with your naked eye and then enhance the view with binoculars and telescopes. Everywhere you look in the night sky you can see stars, but if you magnify the view, you can see nebulae and galaxies, details on planets and in comet tails, and even small little chunks of rock called asteroids.
The Hubble Space Telescope gives us magnified views of the universe every day. In recent weeks it spotted a small asteroid wending its way through the field of view as the telescope was studying a small companion to the Milky Way called the Sagittarius Dwarf Irregular Galaxy. You can see the trail of the asteroid as it traveled across HST’s view. The wavy path is not the actual path of the asteroid—it doesn’t actually wander quite that frenetically. It’s wandering a bit because the telescope is a) moving, and b) several different images were taken over a period of time. That’s why the trail looks interrupted and not quite straight.
What I find fascinating is the field of stars and galaxies that the HST image also shows. If you look closely you’ll see a few distant spirals, some edge-on galaxies, and some other blobs of light that are either too distant or too faint to make out good shapes. The scattering of stars across the top of the image is part of the dwarf galaxy the scientists were after when they took the images. It’s about 3.5 million light-years away, while the most distant galaxies in the image are at least a hundred million light-years away. The asteroid, on the other hand, is about 169 million miles away from us. It’s quite a panoramic view of the cosmos in one image—and definitely MORE than meets the eye!
