A Spooky Knot in the Veil Nebula

NGC206 is an unusual object. It’s a cluster of stars, which in itself is not unusual at all… but it’s in ANOTHER GALAXY. The Andromeda Galaxy, to be precise. The fact that we can see it so clearly, two and a half million light-years away, boggles the mind. It’s that cluster of blue stars near…

I’ve imaged the Rosette Nebula several times, but this is the first from the dark skies of Central Texas and with some better optics as well. I took a lighter touch on the processing this time, since the data was better – and it results in a smoother, more natural look than previous takes.

There’s a big cluster of galaxies within Virgo; it’s just filthy with them. People usually image a different part of it, but I found another interesting area that’s often overlooked. The grand-design spiral at the bottom is NGC5364; it’s about 55 million light-years away. The annotated image identifies its buddies.

I’ve imaged this one before, but for whatever reason I picked up way more detail on it last night. Part of it’s a better camera and better tracking on the telescope mount, but I think conditions may have just been really awesome last night. It’s not normal to have this many good nights for astrophotography…

This image really blows my mind – this is the reflection nebula NGC1333 in Perseus. The blue part is reflected gas and dust from the star that’s lighting up – that’s nothing too unusual. But check out the little red blobs above it. Many of those are “Herbig-Haro” objects, formed by jets spewing out from…

I don’t know why the press has latched onto the name “the green comet” for C/2022 E3 (ZTF) – most comets are green, and it’s too dim to see any color at all if you’re viewing it through binoculars or a telescope. But through 2 hours of total exposure time, the colors do emerge, and…