"..This is an image of the Orion Nebula - a star forming region in the Orion constellation (Kalpurush/কালপুরুষ in Bangla) as seen from my balcony in New Jersey on 25th December 2013 between 1 and 3 a.m in the south western sky.
The nebula is more than 1,400 light years from earth. So the light captured here has been travelling for 1,400 years.To put it in perspective, the light started near the end of the Gupta Empire in India and landed on my camera sensor on Christmas of 2013). "
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Thus began my email I wrote to a friend in 2013. It was the day after I had made my first deep sky photo using only a camera, a tripod and a computer (yes, no telescope). He was a friend from my undergraduate days, now a professor in the UK and shared some of my excitement. The email continued ...
"Estimated to be over 3 million years old (a cosmic infant by age, at 1/15th the age of the Earth) and about 24 light years across. It can also be seen with the naked eye appearing as a twin star like object in the "sword of the Orion" and as a visibly nebulous structure with binoculars (our eyes see no color at such low light levels). The final photo begins to show some color as red/ green hues.
The picture was made using a digital SLR camera (with a zoom set at around 230 mm) on a tripod.The nebulousness is tiny and hard to spot in any of the "original" in-camera pictures and appears as a small twin-star at the frame's center.
For comparison, here is a NASA picture of the Orion Nebula using the Hubble space telescope (which incidentally costs over $2 billion) lower left juxtaposed with a hand sketch of the same by none other than Charles Messier in 1771. "
(Email Truncated)
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Obviously my picture was nowhere close to the HST image but on the other hand it was far improved than what Messier had drawn 250 years ago. I could see the shape clearly and there were hints of colors too which I knew what my eye would really see (given I had take with my own camera) had the human eye been able to discern colors in low light.
One of the most vivid memories of how the picture was made was the painful process. It was a bitter cold night. I was "tracking" the nebula with my camera by hand, using nothing but the camera on a ball head mount on a tripod set on the balcony of my second floor rental apartment in Woodbridge New Jersey. The night was so cold that I had to step indoors from time to time for short respites from the freezing air into the warmth of the house. The door would not close fully as a cable connecting my computer to the camera stuck through the gap and cold air leaked in. The computer that shared a black recliner with me, acted as a makeshiftt intervalometer as I did not have one. As anyone familiar with the process knows, taking this picture without a tracking mount or a telescope is extremely laborious and full of trial and error and frustration. You try to guess the amount of movement to keep the object centered from one long exposure shot to the next as it tries to escape due to the spin of the earth. If you are not careful, you lose the object from "view," and then begins another trial and error attempt of finding it. At the end of several "trips", my fingers were numb, my back hurt and I was wondering why I was dragging myself through this ordeal while the rest of the world slept in peace.
One of the most vivid memories of how the picture was made was the painful process. It was a bitter cold night. I was "tracking" the nebula with my camera by hand, using nothing but the camera on a ball head mount on a tripod set on the balcony of my second floor rental apartment in Woodbridge New Jersey. The night was so cold that I had to step indoors from time to time for short respites from the freezing air into the warmth of the house. The door would not close fully as a cable connecting my computer to the camera stuck through the gap and cold air leaked in. The computer that shared a black recliner with me, acted as a makeshiftt intervalometer as I did not have one. As anyone familiar with the process knows, taking this picture without a tracking mount or a telescope is extremely laborious and full of trial and error and frustration. You try to guess the amount of movement to keep the object centered from one long exposure shot to the next as it tries to escape due to the spin of the earth. If you are not careful, you lose the object from "view," and then begins another trial and error attempt of finding it. At the end of several "trips", my fingers were numb, my back hurt and I was wondering why I was dragging myself through this ordeal while the rest of the world slept in peace.
Despite all this, I felt privileged compared to the great astronomers like Galileo and Charles Messier hundreds of years ago who discovered these objects with much inferior equipment through plain visual observation, hand drawn sketches and possibly a healthy dose of tenacity and discipline. While I did not push the boundaries of human knowledge like them, I did advance my own understanding of our place in space and time.
And that somehow made it worthwhile.
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