My neighbor's comment about his telescope made me see things differently

I was helping him move a new 8-inch Dobsonian into his garage last weekend. He pointed at a faint smudge on his phone screen, a photo he took from his driveway, and said 'That's the Andromeda Galaxy. It's bigger than the moon in our sky, we just can't see it.' I'd always chased clear shots of planets, thinking galaxies were for pros with better gear. His simple phone pic, showing that huge fuzzy patch, changed my mind. What's a good first galaxy target for someone with a basic DSLR and a tripod?

3 comments

3 Comments

ruby_rivera761mo ago

Honestly, that's a cool story. Tbh, my uncle had a similar thing happen with the Pleiades. He was just messing around with an old camera lens and caught that little star cluster, and it totally blew his mind how much was up there.

iris5741mo ago

Read somewhere it's actually hundreds of stars.

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joseph_adams661mo ago

Hundreds is still way too low lol, old mate @ruby_rivera76 is closer with the Pleiades thing. Ancient Greek astronomers counted like six or seven stars with the naked eye, but once telescopes got involved they found out it's actually over a thousand stars in that cluster alone. The whole sky is packed like that, every little smudge you see is probably a whole galaxy with billions of stars. It's easy to think we've got it all mapped out but the universe just keeps proving us wrong, which I think is pretty cool.