Cone Nebula

Imaged in narrowband filters from my suburban driveway. This object lives up to its name with the right color mappings!

Had a couple of clear nights recently, and trained the ‘scope at the Rosette Nebula again. By combining this year’s data with last year’s, I created an image with a total 27 hours of exposure time! The Rosette Nebula is about 5,000 light-years away within the constellation Monoceros, and is the birthplace of the cluster…

Here’s my latest image of the “Bubble Nebula”, one of my favorite objects in our galaxy. That blue “bubble” is a shell of gas pushed out by the stellar wind of the bright star just right of its center. It’s a big star, 10-20 times larger than our sun. Its radiation is also illuminating and…

I just added a Lunt 40mm solar telescope to the arsenal here… figuring it out was challenging, but eventually I got it working! This ain’t bad for my very first solar image; still lots to learn though.

Somewhere between 30 and 50 million light-years away, within the constellation Coma Berenices, lies NGC4565 – commonly known as the “Needle Galaxy”. It’s a spiral galaxy, but viewed edge-on – so we see its central bulge and the edge of the galaxy’s disc extending from it. Clouds of dust within the galaxy obscure the middle…

A nebula that looks like its name! Formally SH-308, this bubble of gas 60 light-years across is blown out by a hot Wolf-Rayet star at its center. It’s about 4500 light-years away in the constellation Canis Majoris. It’s quite dim, but if you could see it with bionic vision or something, it would be larger…