Triangulum Galaxy

There’s a big cluster of galaxies within Virgo; it’s just filthy with them. People usually image a different part of it, but I found another interesting area that’s often overlooked. The grand-design spiral at the bottom is NGC5364; it’s about 55 million light-years away. The annotated image identifies its buddies.

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…

This image contains a few things! At the bottom is the Cone Nebula, at the upper-right is the “Fox Fur Nebula”, and in the middle is the “Christmas Tree” star cluster… you have to flip the image upside down to see that one. It’s a gorgeous region of active star formation in the constellation Monoceros….

We recently obtained a new telescope for observing the planets, and we had our first good conditions for planetary imaging this morning! This is the best image of Jupiter I’ve ever gotten, and I’m hopeful that it will be even better once it gets closer to Earth in a couple of Months. Saturn’s not looking…

Our new house has plenty of land, reasonably dark skies, and a reasonable homeowner’s association… so of course I had to try building an observatory! It may sound crazy, but it does offer a lot of advantages: I no longer have to set up my telescope, wait for dark, polar align it, and run a…

You’re looking at about 500,000 stars, balled up just outside of our galaxy. They are ancient; about 8 billion years old.