Mind-boggling things to see with your own eyes....

....possibly with some help from a small telescope.

The M101 supernova is harder than ever to see now. Let's emphasise just how mind-boggling several other, less elusive, maybe less hyped sky sights are.

1. Crab Nebula Quite a small telescope (e.g. 3" refractor) will show the Crab Nebula clearly, although it does suffer in light polluted conditions. Look closely at the ESO image. What is that strange blue glow it's shrouded in, that seems to overlay the coloured filaments? It's synchrotron radiation, the glow of electrons moving at 99.999999..% of the speed of light (i.e.with enormous individual energies) in the presence of a magnetic field. Synchrotron radiation seems to lack any sort of easy description on the WWW. Anyway here's the Wikipedia article, too technical for many but including a nice historical bit. Those electrons are so energetic ultimately because of the Crab nebula's pulsar; a routine kind of object to strophysicists but still, let's face it, extremely exotic. And this is some of the glow you see in a small telescope.
   
2. White dwarf A stellar ember, the mass of the Sun but the size of the Earth, glowing now only because it's still hot from its glory days as the core of a star. A spoonful does indeed weigh a ton. The white dwarf in the triple star system Keid is maybe one of the easiest to spot in a small telescope, as people in some of my DACE classes have seen.
   
3. The Andromeda galaxy Not immediately arresting, often hidden in urban light pollution, this enigmatic, elongated smudge is nonetheless quite obvious to the naked eye if you're somewhere reasonably dark and you look in roughly the right place. Who would have guessed, in the time before telescopes, that it represents the summed-up light of 100,000,000,000 stars? That had taken two and a half million years to reach us? And yet there it is in plain view.
   
4. The Milky Way that ethereal band of light, so familiar to people of earlier cultures, sadly now buried in light pollution for most Earthlings. Its appearance tells us we live in the middle of an enormous, disk-shaped system of stars, gas and dust; our own galaxy. Here's a fabulous panorama.
   
5. The darkness between the stars tells us that our Universe started at a finite time in the past. Really.
   

In small telescopes the Crab Nebula and Andromeda galaxy are just smudges, and any white dwarf just a wee faint star. It's looking at them in the knowledge of their natures that makes them really fascinating.