The Moon

This image was something of a happy accident – I spent a night capturing narrowband data on M16, the Eagle Nebula (home of the famous “pillars of creation”.) Of course I had to try reproducing the iconic Hubble image as best I could, but the color palette they use results in big, ugly, magenta-colored stars….

If you’re serious about becoming a better astrophotographer, like with anything, it’s all about practice. With every image you produce, you’ll learn something that makes your next image a little better. But life has a habit of getting in the way. You’ve had a long, tiring day at work – do you really want to…

The Horsehead and Flame nebulas, although popular, are really difficult to image together. The clouds of Hydrogen look best using narrowband filters, but the blue reflection nebula below the Horsehead only appears in wideband, color filters. Further complicating matters is the bright star Alnitak, one of the stars that makes up Orion’s belt. In narrowband,…

Formally this nebula is called vdB93, but more commonly it is a part of the “seagull nebula.” The larger nebula really does look like a flying bird, but it’s a little too big to fit in the field of view of my telescope – so I focused instead on its “head” where most of the…

This is the Tulip Nebula in Cygnus, but see that shell-like structure just above it, to the right a little? That’s the bow shock wave of Cygnus X-1, a stellar-mass black hole! It’s one of the most powerful X-ray sources in the sky – but don’t worry, our atmosphere protects you from it. 20 hours…

I’ve imaged M33, the “Triangulum Galaxy” before – but not yet from our new home with darker skies and better equipment. I’m really pleased with how this came out – although M33 is very close to us (2-3 million light-years – that’s close by galactic standards!) it is notoriously difficult to image. Although it’s close,…