Locomotoring

We are continuing with our rough drafts of the deep sky. We have a tiny courtyard, our house is built around this courtyard (a cultural memory of Indian homes) and is lovingly branded the Aangan “courtyard” house. Taking deep sky photos from the courtyard has its pros and cons. The big pro is we live here. We have high speed internet. Every clear night comes with a possibility where we are experimenting and learning from our successes and failures. Gemini is at our beck and call and helps us troubleshoot like an old friend. The big con is that we have an intimate courtyard (by design, but at the time of the design, we weren’t into deep sky photography!). It is a wooden deck that responds to traffic going by. There are massive trees on two sides, including a heritage oak. And a mess of electric poles and wires on the other two sides (reminds me of back home!). What we have is the overhead and a small time window – say 2-3 hours with our current efficiency of 50% (i.e., 60-90 minutes of image integration time).

We shared our horsehead and flame nebula image with our home architect, Lynn, and in her words, “it feels like a little glimpse into the chaos of the universe”. I hadn’t thought of the physics driven universe as chaos, but in many ways it is. It is quite purposeless. It doesn’t care that a couple of humans, sitting on this pale blue dot of a planet are painstakingly observing.

Hence, the series, Chaos Overhead. It will mark a series of deep sky objects observed from this little courtyard, mostly rough experiments that we hope to improve as we skill up.