Shimmering clouds
It’s a funny position to be in, that of observing a galaxy that I’ve seen countless times and yet seeing it for the first time in a new light. With apologies to Arthur Schopenhauer, I like to think “the task is not to see what has never been seen before, it’s instead to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everyone sees”.
After observing many extraordinarily faint objects with my new 33-cm f/3.0 richest-field telescope, under the stars one gloriously clear and transparent night I thought to ‘go for broke’ and try observing the near M81 and M82. To my astonishment, upon centring the galaxies, I could detect faint nebulosity crisscrossing the field of view. It was an extraordinary moment — like stepping through a door into a new universe of
