Thor’s Helmet

About 2,700 light-years away within the constellation Monoceros lies the Cone and Fox Fur Nebulas, containing the “Christmas Tree Cluster” of stars as well. I’ve imaged this many times before, but have never been happy with the results. By combining data from last year with more data collected this year however, I finally got enough…

Here’s IC417, commonly known as the “Spider Nebula.” Just outside of the frame is a smaller one called the “Fly Nebula,” but my field of view isn’t quite big enough to capture them together! It’s about 10,000 light-years away, in the constellation Auriga. Imaged over 15 hours; narrowband nebula blended with RGB stars.

I shot this object in a few different ways. Here’s how it looks in pure “LRGB” light – how it would appear to the eye in its natural wavelengths, if your eyes could detect color on something so dim! And here’s a narrowband take on this same object. Notice that the structure of its core…

M13, the great globular cluster in Hercules. You can see some of its interesting neighbors, including the galaxy NGC 6207 in the lower-left. While M13 itself is 25,000 light-years away just above our galactic plane, NGC 6207 is 37 million light-years distant. About halfway between the two, the galaxy IC 4617 is also visible –…

It’s been really cloudy lately in Central Florida, so instead of imaging from my driveway, I’ve tried using remote observatories. This particular image was taken using a telescope in Australia, using a service called telescope.live. This is the “Coalsack nebula”, a dark cloud of gas obscuring the Milky Way in the Southern hemisphere. We’re looking…

Globular clusters are mysterious objects – they are dense clusters of stars, some containing hundreds of thousands of them. And they’re not within the plane of the Milky Way galaxy; they are scattered around it. How they formed is a bit of a mystery. Did they form with our galaxy, or are they the cores…