Photography - astronomy

Everyone who has ever looked at the night sky is sure to ask the same questions. What is out there and how did it come about, will the universe last forever or also die one day? The fact that life on our planet and the appearance of humans are not due to a planning designer, but to the ability of matter to organize itself, is difficult to believe in our goal-oriented and meaning-oriented thinking. The message from Charles Darwin is: In the flora and fauna there exists what has resulted from the interplay of random genetic variations and the effects of the environment and was able to reproduce, everything else has not prevailed and is consequently not available. The way to today's knowledge about the universe was not always easy. It was not uncommon for scientists to be persecuted, tortured or even killed for their findings until the late Middle Ages. Dogmas and myths as well as the fairy tale queen astrology have been debunked and belong to the entertainment category. But they are still trying to profit from the reputation of real science and use its vocabulary to appear scientific, but without adhering to the structures and procedures of scientific research. Their alleged phenomena could never withstand critical questions and certainly not scrutiny. Neither progress nor facts can prevent some people from believing in everything that seems fairytale, wondrous or magical. Most of them are unaware of the many problems that these pseudosciences are confronted with. Those who know nothing must believe everything. But the universe was created and developed until today, and also without gods.

Science asks questions and checks the possible answers for their correctness. Findings must be reproducible and verifiable, and the observed phenomena must also be empirically investigatable. Astrophysics is on the search for the eternal reasons of reality, which are independent of what ideas we have of the world. Astronomy cosmology has made tremendous advances in the past hundred years. It is based on mathematics and belongs to the exact natural sciences. Today we know the initial size and the beginning time of the universe. Despite the incredible progress, there are still big unanswered questions. In order to understand the scope and dimensions of the universe, we have to detach ourselves from everyday life and the ideas on earth.

It quickly became clear to me that astrophotography had to be added to conventional photography. It can be increased at will, but then it also becomes more and more demanding. It becomes interesting when you capture objects that you can hardly or no longer see with the naked eye or even with telescopes. It particularly affects deep sky photography. Today astrophotographers can go into areas that were previously only possible in larger observatories. Then one becomes aware of how unimaginably large the observable universe must be. However, we also know that everything we can see and photograph today has long been a thing of the past. Due to the continuous expansion, the universe is actually much larger than the observable part of the universe. With the times and distances that are known to us, we will not get very far there. Then at the latest we have to admit that our presence cannot be as important as we think it is.