This might not look like much – just a bunch of stars, right?
Agreed. But I thought it might be fun to point my scope away from the Milky Way for a change, to peer a little deeper into the intergalactic void. The region you are looking at here is the result of focusing for about 9 hours on a small patch of sky in the constellation of Pegasus, which for me is in the western sky at the moment. We are looking away from the Milky Way, at an angle of about negative 33 – which means our line of sight is about 33 degrees below the plane of our galaxy. That gives us a better view of more distant galaxies, way in the distance.
To see these galaxies, you’ll need to zoom-in quite a bit, and you probably won’t see much if you are using your phone. If you download this and view it on a bigger screen, then you might just be able to make out some of these faraway galaxies, which appear very small in this image, but are distinguishable by their spiral or elliptical shapes.
These galaxies look so tiny because they are so much farther away than all the stars you can see in the foreground. While the stars are mostly in the range of a few hundred to maybe a couple of thousand light years away, the galaxies in the image are several hundred million light years distant. Also, while my f/2.2 astrograph has excellent light-gathering power, it consequently provides a reasonably wide field with very little magnification – hence the other reason these galaxies look so tiny. Perhaps at some point, I will revisit some of these distant places with an f/10 imaging system.
If you hunt around for a bit, you should be able to find some galaxy clusters – there is one especially beautiful cluster in the upper right quadrant of the image.
