Tangible

I've been an astronomer now for over 13 years. One thing that surprises many people is that professional astronomers don't have much of a visceral connection with the night sky. When I'm operating my telescope for work I sit in an air-conditioned control room with fluorescent lighting. Images come from the telescope to my PC where they're often analysed automatically by software written for the purpose. Most of of the time I interact with a stream of numbers, and never even see the pictures.

I don't even need to know my way around the constellations. The telescope's computer-controlled mount takes care of finding my targets for me. I just type in the co-ordinates and off we go. There was a time when I'd been a professional astronomer for nearly 5 years, and didn't know more constellations than Orion and Cassiopeia!

My relationship with the night sky changed a few years ago, when I started to use my spare time at observatories to take pictures of pretty parts of the sky. No telescopes here, just a camera, some lenses and a mount that will track the rotation of the stars in the sky. I've had to actually learn where things are in the night sky. And then there's something truly amazing about pointing a camera at a patch of sky, opening the shutter for a couple of minutes and seeing a beautiful picture of some galaxy or cluster appear on the CCD screen. Suddenly those objects I've known from catalogs and papers seem incredibly real. Tangible. One photo and I know, with a certainty I've never had before, that the Andromeda galaxy is there, hanging in the patch of sky near Cassiopeia.

So tonight I have one of those rare things at an observatory; a night off. Actually, I'm supposed to be working, but the telescope is broken so I've got some spare time, and having worked the previous 11 nights straight, I don't feel like trying to write papers, or analyse data. So I've spent the night outside, under the Milky Way. I set up my camera and my fingerboard, put the Smashing Pumpkins on my iPod at full volume, and hung under the stars whilst my shutter clicked repeatedly. During rest periods I watched for shooting stars. I could get all hippy on you at this stage, but suffice it to say it's been a pretty fucking amazing night. And now, at the end of it, I'm 0.005% stronger, and have this picture to show for it....