• Question: What do you usually see when you look through your telescope?

    Asked by 647xygg39 to Mark on 12 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Mark Kennedy

      Mark Kennedy answered on 12 Nov 2016:


      Unfortunately, normally really, really boring images. Here is an image I took a few years ago using a telescope in Arizona: http://imgur.com/a/sRv14

      The white dots are stars (and the really faint one in the middle is the one I’m interested in). It doesn’t look like much, but images like this contain a lot of useful scientific information, and are really easy to get (that image took the telescope 20 seconds to take).

      Nicer, more complex photos take a lot of time, and normally are not useful for science (but they look awesome). For example, here’s an image the Hubble Space Telescope took of a nebula called The Mystic Mountain. That image took hours and hours of observations to get.

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