Melotte 15

A lot of things have to come together for a good image of the planets. The air needs to be as still as possible, the planet you’re imaging needs to be as directly overhead as possible, and the planet itself should be as close to the Earth as possible. And then, all your equipment has…

Formally Abell 33 or the even more catchy name PK238+34.1, the “diamond ring nebula” is a planetary nebula – that means it’s the gas blown off by a dying star, not too different from our own sun. This one’s interesting due to its almost perfectly spherical shape, its cyan color from ionized Oxygen gas, and…

This was intended to just be an image of the galaxy M77 in Cetus, but quite a few other galactic photobombers showed up! The annotated image below guides you to the brighter galaxies in this image, but click on it to expand it, and you’ll find many other ones as well that are incomprehensibly distant.

Located about 1,300 light-years away, the Iris Nebula is a reflection nebula – unlike most of the nebulas on this site, it’s not made of ionized gases emitting light of their own. It’s just starlight reflecting off clouds of dust. Reflection nebula are harder to image in light-polluted skies, since the narrowband filters we use…

The Monkey Head Nebula is located about 6400 light-years away, in the constellation Orion. It’s a gorgeous cloud of gas surrounding a cluster of young stars. I processed this data a couple of different ways; one using the “Hubble palette” and another using my own color scheme. The colors represent different kinds of ionized gases:…

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.