Cone Nebula

This morning, my cat woke me up at 3 AM, and I noticed it was clear outside. But, the sun would start rising in just a couple of hours, so doing some super-long-exposure shot of a faint nebula wasn’t in the cards. However, globular clusters don’t take long to image, as they are relatively bright…

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…

Formally this nebula is called vdB93, but more commonly it is a part of the “seagull nebula.” The larger nebula really does look like a flying bird, but it’s a little too big to fit in the field of view of my telescope – so I focused instead on its “head” where most of the…

Located 63 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices, M91 is part of the Virgo cluster of galaxies – and if you zoom in and explore this image, you’ll find many other galaxies surrounding it, and also far in the distance beyond it.

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:…

As Halloween draws closer, this seems like an appropriate object to image: the “Witch’s Broom” nebula! Although to be honest, that bright star (Cygnus 56) looks more like an eye on some sort of fantastical, cosmic creature to me. In reality, it’s part of the larger Veil Nebula, which is a huge supernova remnant 1,400…