The Bubble Nebula

It’s globular cluster season, so here’s another one! M80 is found within the constellation Scorpius, and lies a distant 32,600 light-years away – making it one the small side from our vantage point. It contains several hundred thousand stars, and is one of the denser globular clusters in our galaxy. The faint galaxy in the…

The three galaxies in the constellation Leo (M65, M66, and NGC3628) are about 31 million light-years away. Each one is being seen from a different angle; the one viewed edge-on is also known as the “Hamburger Galaxy”. Each has been interacting with each other, and distorting the shapes of these galaxies through the complex dance…

This galaxy is truly one of a kind, at least among that galaxies we have found. It’s a “polar ring galaxy,” probably the result of an unusual collision that left the core lenticular galaxy surrounded by the disk of another galaxy that it merged with. It’s a small, dim object, and just barely detectable from…

Our new observatory is starting to prove its worth… the Trifid Nebula is an object I’ve always wanted to capture, but in our previous location it was too low in the sky and was always obstructed by trees. Further complicating matters, it is a summertime object, and here in Florida summertime is the worst time…

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….

Located about 34,000 light-years away within the constellation Canes Venatici, this tight ball of half a million stars formed just outside the disk of our galaxy – and so its stars never got mixed in with it. They’ve just been sitting there for over 11 billion years. One of the prettiest globular clusters in the…