Amateur Astronomy is Thriving on Social Media
upstart writes:
Amateur Astronomy Is Thriving on Social Media:
Schricker is one of many amateur astronomers to embrace the dazzling hobby in the past two years, as home-bound stargazers sought to put their free time to use peering deep into the universe. Access has gotten easier, as the cost of the (still quite expensive) equipment has become more reasonable, and the technology has made the complex process of capturing images of the stars easier.
[...] Schricker acknowledges that all these hours spent aiming his equipment at unfathomably large and distant clusters of stars has a way of making a person feel pretty small, even insignificant. He is not the first and won't be the last astronomer to experience this sensation. But he embraces it. Deep space has a way of putting all our earthly problems-like, say, the global pandemic that pushed him toward this hobby in the first place-in perspective.
I get a lot of people telling me they look at my pictures and it gives them like an existential crisis. But for me, it's actually helpful to remember that I'm just not that important, that you're just this blip on a speck of dust," he says, channeling Carl Sagan, who famously called the Earth a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." He continues We get so worried about all these things, that we have all these anxieties, and it's like, you need to stop and remember that you're really small, and really precious."
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