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.
At the center of this image is the distant galaxy NGC210, 65 million light-years away within the constellation Cetus. It’s mind-blowing that we can capture an image of something so distant from our backyards, given the right technology. It’s also mind-blowing that we’re looking at light that has been traveling for 65 million years, giving…
You’re looking at about 500,000 stars, balled up just outside of our galaxy. They are ancient; about 8 billion years old.
This is the Christmas Tree Cluster (turn the picture upside down and you might see it!) But the real focus here is the Cone Nebula at the bottom of the image, and the Fox Fur Nebula in the upper-right. Lots of red Hydrogen gas here being ionized by the young stars it formed. Also visible…
This is a small part of a larger nebula called the “Baby Nebula” (also known as the Soul Nebula) in the constellation Cassiopeia. If you see a baby in the larger nebula this is part of, this image would be of the baby’s bottom đŸ™‚ There is a ton of star formation going on in…
This morning, my cat woke me up at 3 AM, and I noticed it was clear outside. But, the sun would start rising in just a couple of hours, so doing some super-long-exposure shot of a faint nebula wasn’t in the cards. However, globular clusters don’t take long to image, as they are relatively bright…
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.
