Cone Nebula

The Pelican Nebula frankly isn’t a very attractive object as a whole, but if you crop it down to its heart, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on. Look for little puffs in the image, or areas with spikes coming out of them. Those are Herbig-Haro objects – stars that are still in the…

This edge-on spiral is around 40 million light-years away within the constellation Coma Berenices. Lots of satellite and background galaxies to explore around it! Zoom in, and travel back in time – hundreds of millions of years.

This week’s target was Thor’s Helmet (NGC 2359), an emission nebula in Canis Major a rather distant 12,000 light-years away. It’s formed by a Wolf-Rayet star in its center, which is a crazy-hot star whose immense stellar wind is bunching up and ionizing the gases around it in these complex patterns. It’ll probably go supernova…

This is the Christmas Tree Cluster (turn the picture upside down and you might see it!) But the real focus here is the Cone Nebula at the bottom of the image, and the Fox Fur Nebula in the upper-right. Lots of red Hydrogen gas here being ionized by the young stars it formed. Also visible…

Formally NGC1570, the “Northern Trifid” is a combination of an emission nebula (the red parts, which is ionized Hydrogen emitting its own light) and a reflection nebula (the blue parts, which is starlight reflecting off dust.) You can also see hints of the dust surrounding this area, which is difficult to capture under the light-polluted…

This is NGC281, or the “Pac-Man” nebula. I think it’s one of those objects that might look a little like its name if you’re viewing it through a big telescope in a dark sky, but takes on a totally different character in long-exposure, narrowband images such as this. This is a total of 13 hours…