The Moon
A full moon captured with a Canon T6i DSLR.
A full moon captured with a Canon T6i DSLR.
Here’s another galaxy with no nearby neighbors, and no catchy nicknames either: NGC 3344. It’s about 22.5 million light-years away within the constellation Leo Minor. Although it doesn’t get the love it deserves, it’s a glorious face-on barred spiral galaxy that’s about half the size of our own Milky Way. Explore the space around it,…
Also in Hercules, M92 is often passed over for its larger and more dazzling neighbor, M13. But M92 is pretty in its own way! It’s also one of the oldest globular clusters in our galaxy (over 11 billion years old) and has some very interesting background galaxies around it too.
If you’re a fellow amateur astronomer, you might be curious as to how our “live star parties” on our Boldly Going YouTube Channel are produced. The more people doing this, the better! Here’s how it all works behind the scenes, which might give you some ideas on how to produce your own show. The Heart…
If you point your telescope outside of the Milky Way, you’re almost guaranteed to pick up very distant galaxies, because there are just so many of them out there. This patch of sky inside Cancer is a cluster of galaxies called Abell 671. If you click the image and look at it full size, you’ll…
This is NGC281, or the “Pac-Man” nebula. I think it’s one of those objects that might look a little like its name if you’re viewing it through a big telescope in a dark sky, but takes on a totally different character in long-exposure, narrowband images such as this. This is a total of 13 hours…
Seems I revisit this pair of galaxies, 12 million light-years distant, every year. Although they are close and bright as galaxies go, they are challenging targets for imaging – especially if you are trying to pull out the faint jets spewing out of the Cigar Galaxy on the right. This image represents over 25 hours…