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The Moon is Ready for its Close-Up
Last night I set out to image Jupiter and Saturn, but both are pretty far away at this point, and the atmospheric conditions weren’t great. So I tried for the Moon instead. We take our nearest celestial neighbor for granted – there’s a whole world right next to us, waiting for us to explore it!…

The “Pac-Man” Nebula?
This gorgeous nebula, formally known as NGC281 in the constellation Cassiopeia, goes by the informal name of “The Pac-Man Nebula.” I don’t see a Pac-Man. I think it’s a case where if you look at it through a telescope with your eyes, you only see the brightest parts – and then, maybe it looks a…

M106 and some of its buddies
The galaxy M106 is an interesting one; it’s large and relatively bright – about the same size as Andromeda. And it’s in a busy part of the sky, within Canes Venatici, with lots of galactic neighbors. This image has been enhanced with Hydrogen emission data; that’s what the red dots and tendrils are. There’s one…

The Rosette Nebula
The Rosette Nebula is about 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros. It’s the birthplace of the cluster of stars it contains. While it doesn’t look much like a Rose in this view, the false-color narrowband image below brings out more of its structure. 7 1/2 hours of total exposure time, on New Year’s Eve…

A Celestial Swan
This is M17, the “Swan Nebula”. Everyone seems to see something different in it! To me the whole thing looks like a swan seen from the side, but my family sees different birds within it. It’s like seeing shapes in clouds, which makes sense, as this is just a really, really big cloud of gas…

The Monkey Head Nebula
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:…