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Greg

Astronomy Retreat:

Near the end of August, I travelled to Cherry Springs State Park, PA. Cherry Springs is a protected dark sky site with an astronomy field specifically for imaging and observing the night sky. http://www.dcnr.state.pa.us/stateparks/findapark/cherrysprings/

I had two amazing nights with great skies and lots of great conversations with fellow imagers and observers.

A skunk visited the field the first night! The people he visited reacted aggressively to his presence… He showed his disapproval by spraying their tent! “Ground-zero” (we’ll call it) was on the opposite end of the field, so I was fortunate to avoid most of the excitement.

The cloud from “Pepe Le Pew” soon dissipated and was replaced by beautiful star clouds. A beautiful cross-section of our galaxy hung straight over head at the beginning of the night and Orion was well up in the eastern sky by 4:30am. The forecast showed average ‘seeing’, but it was the best skies I have ever seen.

I imaged the Helix Nebula, a large planetary nebula located in the constellation Aquarius. Simply put, this nebula is a large, colorful, egg-shaped sphere of illuminated gases. From our vantage point, we look 30 degrees off its centre axis. This creates a bit of a 3D effect.

The Helix has been nicknamed “The Eye of God” so I entered that name in a bible search and came up with this solid truth: The eyes of the Lord are in every place, watching the bad and the good. (Proverbs 15:3)



Helix Nebula - 47 x 5min frames = 3 hours 55 minutes total exposure at 1600 iso