In summer, the night side of our humble planet's turned towards the centre of our galaxy which we can find in Sagittarius. Although the Milky Way's largest and brightest in that area, it's not all that easy to take a peek into the depths of our galaxy because its core remains mostly hidden behind dark clouds of interstellar dust. And yet, here and there these clouds show holes which offer invaluable observing windows towards the nucleus. One of these "holes" we call M24, which we can already identify with the naked eye as a bright patch in the Milky Way. This object's a delight in binoculars and small telescopes with its thousands of stars that shine towards us from at least 10,000 to 16,000 light-years distance. Larger telescopes, on the other hand, magnify a bit too much to appreciate this stellar cloud fully so in this blog post I will concentrate on a detail which lies near its soutwestern edge.
You'll immediately notice two bright reflection nebulae at the centre, denominated NGC6590/5 (top) and NGC6589 (bottom). The term "reflection nebula" implies that these nebulae do not emit light on their own - they're not hot enough for that - but that they merely reflect the light of the stars that are imbedded in them. These nebulae lie a lot closer to us, at a distance of roughly 2,000 light-years.
To the left of my drawing you can see a large but faint nebula, which is in fact a part of a gigantic hydrogen cloud (IC1283/4) in which new stars are born at a distance of some 10,000 light-years.
A dark dustlane cuts the background in two and on the right we have the edge of the window I was talking about earlier. It rather looked like another "cloud" through my telescope and it was impossible to identify any individual stars in it, but I "had the impression" that it was made up of millions of stars, so that's what I've tried to reflect in this sketch.
It may not appear as such at first sight, but this is probably my most demanding sketch so far, with at least 150-200 stars identified and drawn!
Impresionante narración e impresionante dibujo.
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