First Light

A few nights ago it was cool and clear in Mayhill, New Mexico, and I got my first image of a special part of the sky: a place just above the two back stars in the cup of the Big Dipper: Phecda and Megrez.

It's a special part of the sky because there's a little area in which there are no 'local' stars at all.  No stars from our galaxy. It's the place where the Hubble pointed when it took the exposures that were put together to make the Hubble Deep Field image, almost twenty years ago.

My exposure lasted 600 seconds.  Here it is, though greatly reduced for your viewing convenience.

I have also greatly messed with the image's grayscale curve, so that you can see more stars in it.  The original is 16 bits deep -- each pixel is a number between 0 and 65535 -- which your monitor cannot display and your eyes cannot discern.

Now let's zoom in by a factor of two on the center....

Please bear in mind that the Hubble exposure lasted over 100 hours -- about 600 times longer than mine, and its mirror has 23 times the light-collecting area that my beloved T11 has, and, oh just by the way, that it's above the freaking atmosphere! 
So my picture won't look like theirs.

But it's mine.


So...now let's zoom in by one more factor of two.

And here is your window.

The stars that are linked with the pretty cyan lines are local.  Everything else inside that box, all of those dim lights, are distant galaxies.


Wanna take a ride?