Galaxies

By John Reed

I ‘m not sure why I am so fascinated by these giant collections of suns, gas and dust.  Possibly because of their size, possibly because of their various shapes: pinwheels, globes or simply rough splashes of stars.  Maybe I’m mesmerized by their stupendous distance; they being so far that their light is very ancient, yet still detectable to our mortal eyes buttressed by rather modest equipment.  All these reasons are good ones for liking galaxies, but I think that even if I didn’t know any of these cold, lifeless facts about them I would still love them.  Putting all the statistics aside, they are simply  gorgeous.

I have spent many long moments simply watching the cream swirl into my morning coffee much like witnessing a spiral galaxy swirling through the blackness of  space.  I have watched with fascination as low pressure systems whirl across the weather map on TV indicating coming rain and bleak winter clouds.  I have watched as the water drains from my daughter’s bath: swirling and breaking up, only to once more form a dainty glass-like funnel which she tries to grasp in her small fingers.  All these things would seem connected, yet they are on vastly different scales.  I am not sure I understand why nature does things in such a repetitive way.  I don’t know this and yet the abstract beauty of it is still sole shaking, leaving me to ponder the very nature of our world and the cosmos beyond.

When my telescope sweeps up a dim, almost invisible disk of light I know that I am directly experiencing one of the most extraordinary phenomena nature has to offer.  I was at an informal gathering of club members held at the property and was trying out my new baby for the first time.  It was a cool, clear night at our observatory on the mountain and my 18" dobsonian seemed to be working well.  It gave sharp images of the stars and unveiled the more distant galaxies behind them.  M33 was a slightly oblong pinwheel of dust motes and smoke, punctuated with nebula that showed in amazing contrast when viewed through my UHC filter.  Looking like small patches of greenish light, these gas clouds must have been huge to be visible at such a distance.  I think the Triangulum Galaxy is about three million light years away.  I wonder If these nebulas are M33’s equivalent of our Orion Nebula?  Vast stretches of fluorescing hydrogen gases are scattered throughout our galaxy, so it stands to reason that they would inhabit other island universes as well.  The next day Bill Franke went back into his archives and noted that he had photographed these nebulae without even realizing what they were!

Perhaps the most exciting visual event that night was when I swept up NGC 7331 in Pegasus.  This beautiful whirlpool of starlight is at a more oblique angle than M33, yet the way its central nucleus spans the elliptical disk and then abruptly tapers into faint fragile spiral arms is more esthetically delightful than the more obvious features of face on M33.  Beautiful as 7331 is, I was astounded to note that one of the nearby companion galaxies was also visible.  This little island of light was just visible and looked only slightly oval.  No structure or arms were visible.  I remember wondering if it was the equivalent of our Magellanic Clouds: a small irregular galaxy held captive by giant 7331; or is it a chance background galaxy that was equally large, just shrunk by distance?  If so how far was it?  How ancient its light?

Further south lay nestled five tiny galaxies which I happened to know the number defining their remoteness .  I seem to recall that they are about 400 million light years removed from our corner of the universe.  This staggering reality really doesn’t register with the human mind, its merely an abstract quantity.  And yet astronomers say that there are things that are a great deal further than this.  My scope showed at least four of Stephen’s Quintet (two are almost touching and hard to resolve in an amateur scope).  They were very subtle, yet I could just view them directly without resorting to visual tricks such as averted vision.  They floated ethereally in the eyepiece of my telescope, almost like a clandestine secret of nature that I was never meant to behold.  And yet I did see them with the help of an optical  prosthesis called a telescope which I had fashioned from wood, glass and bits of metal.  It was a brisk night, but my mind was far away from this diminutive planet and its frigid zephyrs.   There was too much majestic beauty in the heavens to worry about such mundane physical things.  Almost too much too worry about anything except gazing into those secret depths for prolonged moments that seemed to go on forever.

It is times like these that I know why I love astronomy.