NGC7635
The Enigmatic Joy of Men: In Pursuit of the "Sublime and Useless"
People often joke that once a man has food on the table, his ultimate happiness comes from obsessing over things that look grand, expensive, and completely "useless." Looking back at my life, I have always been that restless kid driven by an insatiable hunger to understand how the physical world works. From certified gemstone appraisal and micro-mechanical watchmaking to 30-meter single-breath freediving (and somehow, a mermaid certification) and multi-night deep-sky astrophotography, these pursuits might look like chaotic hobbies on the surface. But to me, surgery, physics, and exploration are all cut from the exact same cloth: true joy begins the moment you refuse to stay on the surface and push deep enough to decode the underlying mechanics of reality.
A Cosmic Bubble Over Urban Smog: Capturing the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635) with an 18-Hour Balcony Exposure
As a child, I constantly stared at the night sky, wondering how vast the universe really was and what was hiding out there in the dark. Growing up and spending my days as an orthopedic surgeon didn't extinguish that curiosity—if anything, it made me hungrier for direct, tangible answers. About four years ago, in the summer of 2022, I turned my optical rig toward the constellation Cassiopeia to capture the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635) from my northeast-facing balcony in downtown Guangzhou. Shooting through Bortle 7–8 light pollution, I relied on ultra-narrowband filters and an apochromatic refractor to stack 210 five-minute exposures, accumulating 18 hours of raw starlight. I am the first to admit that post-processing is my biggest technical weakness—I still rely on automated PixInsight scripts and quick adjustments on my phone—but seeing this delicate interstellar bubble emerge from the urban haze with my own gear was pure, grounding magic.