Wednesday was Andrea’s first time learning to operate the telescope — so cool! To sit down and type little lines of code into your computer, knowing that it’s controlling some telescope miles away is so surreal.
Honestly, we were a bit tired as finals season was starting to creep in but morale was still high. We even had some K-pop keeping us going as we got through our training.
We ended up imaging the Carina Nebula as well as the Lagoon Nebula. These names are some of the tamer ones out there. Once you start looking, you can find some really odd names for nebulae. It’s a bit of an “oh, duh” moment when you find out the Electric Guitar Cluster and Running Chicken Nebula don’t actually look like what the title describes.
It was a fun time for Sharon to share the excitement of astrophotography with Andrea (which she could not share with 90% of her friends), as well as the non-excitement of seeing nothing like a queen’s cache in the queen’s cache cluster, at least now she has someone to laugh with. The sarcasm is one of the key fuels that keeps her orbiting the world of astrophotography.
Despite some unexpected errors at first, and the high wind speed, that did not stop us from moving forward, because of course, why would a little atmospheric turbulence thousands of kilometers away stop us from chasing round stars?
Overall, the evening was a success! We took our first images, and they will be processed soon!
ICYMI:
Love this – keep it up, guys!!!!
omg so cool!!