The Eagle Nebula

This solar cycle has been quite a bit more active than forecast. It motivated me to up my game a little bit with solar imaging; this is my first image with a “double stack” setup that results in narrower filtering on the Hydrogen-alpha emissions from the sun. Lots and lots of prominences, filaments, and sunspots…

Officially called M63, this spiral galaxy about 30 million light-years away is part of the same group as the Whirlpool Galaxy.

This week’s target was Thor’s Helmet (NGC 2359), an emission nebula in Canis Major a rather distant 12,000 light-years away. It’s formed by a Wolf-Rayet star in its center, which is a crazy-hot star whose immense stellar wind is bunching up and ionizing the gases around it in these complex patterns. It’ll probably go supernova…

This young star cluster inside the Heart Nebula is lighting up the clouds of gas from which it formed. 3 hours of narrowband exposure from my suburban driveway.

A nebula that looks like its name! Formally SH-308, this bubble of gas 60 light-years across is blown out by a hot Wolf-Rayet star at its center. It’s about 4500 light-years away in the constellation Canis Majoris. It’s quite dim, but if you could see it with bionic vision or something, it would be larger…

Messier 88, within the constellation Coma Berenices, is part of the nearby Virgo cluster of galaxies. And by “nearby”, I mean 50-60 million light years away! The light we’re seeing from this galaxy originated from the time of the dinosaurs. Telescopes are really time machines. There are many other galaxies surrounding M88, both smaller and…