We all know how crazy things seem these days. There seems to be a lot of unrest in the world and many people are just plain scared. Nothing's perfect...maybe that's nothing new. Yet in a strange way it's possible for things to appear quite perfect on a large scale even though the small scale reveals serious flaws.
A photo of planet Earth taken from space makes it look like we live on a nice spherical (and calm) world, yet down here we are well aware of the mountains and valleys and storms that make it not so perfect.
Images of the California Nebula, NGC1499, like the one above, make one think of a huge bubbly cloud of gas. Not a perfect shape, but it's a beautiful image anyway. Or is it? This is only a portion of a 4-panel mosaic project that I worked on last November, using my Zenithstar 105mm refractor and CGE mount. I spent many nights collecting narrowband data on this object, in H-alpha as well as OIII and SII. Unfortunately the fields were not flat enough to allow a perfect stitching together of the frames. Zoom out enough and it appears to be a decent image; but zoom in and you'll find various problems including duplicate and elongated stars.
Maybe right now the whole world should consider taking a step back and viewing things from a wider perspective.
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