My name is Christopher and I live in Sussex in England.
How often I have setup my equipment, just to be tormented by clouds. But I persist so that I may glean into the wonders of the heavens above. Like you I am interested in all the wonders that are hidden from our eyes, up in the darkness between the twinkling stars.
Our Solar System
When we gather photons through a telescope, we are collecting packets of energy, hurtling towards us at the speed of light. So the further the light has travelled the further back in time we are observing. As we peer out from the earth, we encounter the light from the Moon just over a second old, then the rocky planets, such as Mars, some seconds further away. Further still you get to our nearest star, the Sun, where the light we get is about 8 light seconds away. These are followed by the gas giants of Jupiter and Saturn which are about 75 light seconds away.
Our Milky Way
After this you start to encounter other stars, such as alpha century, which is about 4 light years away. As we zoom out further from the our solar system we encounter our nearest stars, each in a different part of the their lifecycle, from bright young blue stars, to the aged ones about to expire. An example of one of these is Arcturus which is in its dying phase, as it shines brightly as a red giant.
In the region of around 500 to 10,000 light years from the earth, you get many fascinating objects, within our local arm of our galaxy the Milky way. These objects include dense clouds of gas and dust known as stellar nurseries, such as the Monkey Head nebula and the diffuse nebula of Orion at about 1350 light years away. In these nebula, stars are being formed as gravity pulls the dust together into extremely high pressure areas where massive heat builds up and stars burst into life in nuclear fusion. After the stars are born stellar winds blow away the dust and the baby stars are left, a classic example of this is the Pleiades
Exotic Objects
Even more exotic objects exist such as supernova remnants, an example of these is Abel 31. Another is the Crab nebula, which is the remnant of an exploded star. This supernova explosion was 900 years ago and based on historical records, a new star bright enough to be seen in the daytime had been recorded in the same part of the sky by Chinese astronomers on 4 July 1054.
As you move further still into the core of the milky way galaxy, our home of over 100 million stars, you come across a super massive black hole. This galactic centre is about 27,700 light-years away. A black hole is a cluster of energy and mass that is so dense that it warps space and time into a gravitational hole. Therefore it does not shine, for it actually eats the light it emits, for the light cannot escape its grasp.
Further out still
Now at a similar distance but away from us out into space, you find star clusters that orbit our galaxy, an example of such a cluster is the Hercules cluster, which is a cluster of about 300,000 stars. These clusters sometimes get too close to us and then our galaxy snacks on the stars in the cluster, which helps our milky way galaxy grow larger.
As you move much further out still about 2.5 million light years, you encounter our close companion galaxy, which we are tidally locked to by gravity, due to its massive size, it is the Andromeda galaxy. This galaxy is about 1 trillion stars and so about 10 times bigger than our milky way. Every time we swing past this super gigantic galaxy, it may snack on stars from our galaxy. This is what we observe when we look at images of the Whirlpool galaxies at 23 million light years away. To get an idea of how galaxies can be tidally locked to each other we can look the Leo Triplet at 35 million light years away.
As you peer further and further out you realise that their are 100s of billions of galaxies, with each one containing 100s of billions of stars and you come to realise just how small our little blue marble is that we live on and that we are just tiny grains of sand.
I hope you enjoy the wonders of what I have found,
Christopher
Note: Use the menu bar on the right to see other fascinating objects in the night sky