One outcome of viewing the Learning Company Understanding the Universe DVDs was a renewed interest in astronomy. In my earlier years I would have responded by purchasing a telescope and never learning to use it properly. Now, older yes and wiser maybe, I looked to the Internet to provide an armchair solution. I discovered MyTelescope. After a couple of false starts, I created this image of the Whirlpool Galaxy by remotely controlling a telescope at an observatory site in southern New Mexico.

For the philosophically inclined, astronomers catalog this spiral galaxy as Messier object 51, and it is 37 million light years distant. That means the light gathered to make the image started its journey 37 million years ago. What I am seeing and photographing is how that galaxy appeared 37 million years ago. Think about that. I’m looking into the past. Armchair time travel.

For the technical curious, the telescope I remotely controlled is a 10″ Schmidt-Cassegrain equipped with a Sony mega-pixel monochrome CCD camera. Camera resolution: 1300×1030 pixels. Field of view: 10 arc minutes horizontal by 8 arc minutes vertical (2 arc seconds per pixel). There is also a spotting camera with a field of view about 55 by 44 degrees.

Next rung on the learning ladder will be to use the color wheels on the CCD camera to create a color image, perhaps of the same galaxy.

Dave, still astronomically challenged but gaining.