A Spooky Knot in the Veil Nebula

There’s a comet in the sky! They don’t appear this bright very often, so don’t miss what could be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see a comet with your own eyes. It’s tough to spot here in suburbia with your eyes, but it’s easy to see with binoculars. Its official name is C/2020 F3 NEOWISE. Just…

The Rosette Nebula is about 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros. It’s the birthplace of the cluster of stars it contains. While it doesn’t look much like a Rose in this view, the false-color narrowband image below brings out more of its structure. 7 1/2 hours of total exposure time, on New Year’s Eve…

We recently obtained a new telescope for observing the planets, and we had our first good conditions for planetary imaging this morning! This is the best image of Jupiter I’ve ever gotten, and I’m hopeful that it will be even better once it gets closer to Earth in a couple of Months. Saturn’s not looking…

This portion of the Veil Nebula, commonly called the “Witch’s Broom,” is part of a larger shell of gas known as the Cygnus Loop. It’s gases blown off from a supernova that exploded 10,000 to 20,000 years ago! The rich red and blue colors are real; this is not a false color image. Shot over…

I trained my telescope at this pair of nebulas in Orion for a total of 10 hours. On the right is the iconic Horsehead nebula – actually a dark cloud of gas in front of the illuminated nebula behind it. To the left is the Flame Nebula. In between, in the upper-left, is the bright…

Like the Bubble Nebula, and Thor’s Helmet, this is formed by the fast stellar wind of the extremely hot star at its heart – which interacts in complex ways from the wind left over from when this star was a red giant. This is roughly 5,000 light-years away. These images were taken over the span…