The remarkable thing is how much life is in that little square. NGC 1399 sits there: a great, ghostly elliptical galaxy, bright but not flashy, the old aunt of the Fornax cluster. Around it, like cousins turning up for a family photograph, are dozens of lesser galaxies. Spirals showing off their arms, barred spirals with that odd central plank, lenticulars that can’t quite decide whether they’re coming or going. Some are perturbed, tugged and twisted by neighbours they can’t quite escape. Others spin peacefully, minding their cosmic manners.
All of this, remember, lies behind the veil of our own Milky Way — a foreground of bright, messy, cheerful stars, like the regulars in a small-town pub whose chatter you have to listen through to hear the quiet voice at the back. Most nights, those stars dominate. But give the camera enough time, and suddenly the deeper universe begins to speak.
That’s the magic of long exposures. They don’t reveal things that aren’t there; they reveal things that are always there, patiently waiting for you to sit still long enough to notice. In the old days, when I was younger and more foolish, I thought astronomy was about quick thrills — chasing comets, snapping bright planets, darting from object to object like a man afraid of missing out. These days, settled in my Middlemarch paddock with a thermos of tea and the occasional inquisitive paradise duck for company, I think the opposite. The universe rewards those who linger.
Looking at the finished image, which contains hundreds of galaxies, you get a sense of scale that’s hard to put into words. Each of those hazy ovals is a city of stars, some larger than the Milky Way, some smaller, all impossibly far away. And yet their light found its way to a farm fence in Otago, landing softly on a camera sensor as the southern night rolled on.
It’s a comforting thought: even from a paddock at the end of a gravel road, the universe is willing to meet you halfway — so long as you give it the time.
