Hope to revisit this under better conditions in the future; but this came out OK considering a bright moon was out the night it was taken. The Pinwheel Galaxy (M101) is near the end of the handle of the Big Dipper in the sky, although physically it is tens of millions of light-years more distant.
This is the Helix Nebula, sometimes also called the “Eye of God” or the “Eye of Sauron”. It’s a planetary nebula, formed by a star blowing off its outer layers of gas before collapsing into the white dwarf you can see at its center. This is thought to be the ultimate fate of our own…
This is a bright, popular nebula deep within the summer Milky Way… but it’s low in the sky, and this is the first time I’ve been able to capture it above the trees. Still, short summer nights and cloudy summer weather present its challenges. Shown processed in the “Hubble palette” and an approximation of its…
The galaxies NGC4567 and NGC4568 are colliding 60 million light-years away. This is really pushing the resolution limits here; we had good “seeing” last night meaning not a lot of turbulence to smear out the light reaching my telescope, and I carefully collimated and calibrated things prior to imaging last night. About as good as…
(Image credit: ddmitr, iStockPhoto.com) Every picture on this site was taken from a suburban driveway in a “red zone” on the light pollution map, literally underneath a streetlight. Every year more subdivisions and apartment buildings spring up in my city, and light pollution from the metro Orlando area just keeps getting worse. There are four…
It’s a good thing galaxies don’t have feelings; they’re just collections of billions of stars. Because NGC 2903 would need therapy. It has no cute nickname like other galaxies; it’s just NGC 2903. And it has no galactic neighbors; most galaxies are gravitationally bound to other galaxies in their local group or cluster, but NGC…
It’s been awhile since I imaged the “Leo Trio” (aka Leo Triplet) of galaxies: M65, M66, and NGC 3628. I wanted to see if my latest equipment, software, and somewhat darker skies made a difference. I’d say so… this is a total of 25 hours of exposure time, including some Hydrogen-alpha filter data to pull…
