Star Gazing

A friend invited me to go with her and a couple of other people to do some star gazing at William O'Brien State Park on Friday evening. Some graduate students in astronomy were on hand to give a little talk with some pictures before we headed outside to have a look through the telescopes. I learned that it takes patience and some practice to be able to focus the telescope on what you want to look at. We started with Saturn and were able to see the rings around it. Later on one of the students tried to find a star nebula. When he did find it, he quickly lost it since it is hard to hold the telescope in place. It is possible to lock it but that movement moves the telescope a bit and might knock what you are looking at out of the field of view. It was getting late and we had an hour drive back to the city so we didn't stick around to see if he was able to focus long enough on a nebula so anyone else could have a look.

The vastness of the universe is mind boggling. It takes over 8 minutes for the light of the sun to arrive on earth. There are billions of stars in our galaxy and astronomers estimate there are billions of galaxies. That adds up to a lot of stars.

One of the things they told us about was the "apod" site where an Astronomy picture of the day is posted. Fascinating stuff! What an awesome creator who created not only the vast universe but also the atoms and cells I've been studying about in biology and chemistry. It is amazing how everything works.