Your Mind's Eye

Took my big, dumb telescope out to a state park early this week for a very satisfying stroll around Sagittarius and Scorpio. This is right where the center of the Milky Way galaxy is, which is part of the allure of that bit of the sky: a black hole millions of times the size of the sun is hiding behind all that dust. You can't see it (and there's a metaphor there I won't bother exploring about the most massive thing in the galaxy being utterly invisible to the human eye). But because you're looking toward the center of things, it's more dense, there's more stuff to see.

Like this.

It's the Omega Nebula. It didn't look nearly as defined in my own scope; I could only see the inner bit that looks like a sitting duck (this is also called the Swan Nebula, for that reason). But that's much of the joy of amateur astronomy, so much of it happens in your head, sketching in the details, seeing it in your mind's eye.

Here's another critter I saw that night. The Triffid Nebula, which brings to mind the great John Wyndham novel Day of the Triffids.

It didn't look quite this clear in my own scope either, though I could just make out the dust lanes. But there is a wealth of activity going on in there, stars in their first birth throes, flinging out tremendous amounts of gas and dust, forming spheres, pillars, small dark knots called Bok Globules (love that term). A detail of this nebula, taken by the Hubble:

So yeah, what you're seeing in your eye is a smudge of white and gray, with a few discernible dark lanes inside it, the barest hint of color. But in your mind you know there is so much more lurking deep in there, waiting for your inner vision to discover it.

For those of you keeping score at home, I also found M22 (a globular cluster, very pretty, picture below), M25 and M28 (open clusters, and disappointing), and the gorgeous Lagoon nebula. My electronic starfinder has been broken for a year, so I found these all the good old fashioned way, pointing it up at the sky and poking around til I found what I was looking for.

Hanny's Voorwerp

No one knows what that blue thing in the picture is. It's called "Hanny's Voorwerp" (Hanny is the name of the Dutch guy who discovered it; Voorwerp means "object" in Dutch). It's gas of some kind, and something is (or was) lighting it up, but no one can figure out what is (or was) doing the actual lighting up.

It looks like a little blue alien guy to me, his arms hugging something we can't see. Or maybe he's doing the hokey-pokey. You put your voorwerp in, you put your voorwerp out....

The theory currently making the rounds is that the galaxy in the middle of the picture once had a big, bright quasar that lit up the voorwerp (I love that word), then disappeared. So the quasar is gone, but evidence of it's light remains in the voorwerp.

The coolest thing about it is that is was discovered by an amateur astronomer. There's this site called Galaxy Zoo where regular folks can log into a vast catalog of galaxy images and classify them, thus helping out the scientific community, not to mention being able to look a a bunch of cool galaxy pictures. SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Life) does this too. Hanny was doing just that, classifying galaxies, saw the blue blob, told the Galaxy Zoo about it, and the rest is history.

Don't know if they're gonna let Hanny name it or not.