Welcome to a new series everyone!  If you happened to catch my 5 Favorite images of 2023 post (and I hope you did), then you’ll have seen this image before.  For a little backstory though, since the leaves have fallen from the trees, I’ve been hard at work creating a lot of new night images in the Smokies, exploring new (to me) parts of the night sky, with the hope of sharing the park in a way that hasn’t been done before.  I’ve got a lot to share, so we’re going to camp out here for a while, but hopefully that will be okay with everyone.  🙂

For this inaugural image, I’d like for you to consider time, and more specifically the span of time represented in this image.  The building featured is, of course, the beautiful Methodist Church in Cades Cove.  The building was completed in 1902, which by US standards is fairly old.  Above the tree to the left is a red object that is known as the Great Lacerta Nebula (SH2-126 its scientific name), which resides about 1200 light years from earth.  So the light that I captured from it here in this image was emitted roughly around the year 824 AD.  Above that, almost to the top of the frame, is the Andromeda Galaxy, our galaxy’s nearest neighbor, at approximately 2.5 million light years away.  So in this image, I captured the light of my flashlight, which was emitted on Nov 28, 2023, and also light that is 2.5 million years old, along side a whole host of stars that are who-knows how far from Earth – altogether in a single moment.  When you stop and consider the grand scale of it all, it’s mind boggling.

Speaking of the Great Lacerta Nebula, below is a much deeper view of the object that I wanted to also share.  This is a two panel mosaic image I created using data from a remote observatory in Spain, thanks to Telescope Live.  Prior to taking the image above, and a few to follow, I’d never even heard of the object.  After I started seeing it show up in my images, I got curious and went looking.  Really cool stuff I think!

More next week!

–Dan Thompson