Cone Nebula

Highlighted here is a recently discovered supernova in the galaxy M61, over 50 million light-years away! This exploding star outshines the entire core of its own galaxy, and many of the much closer stars seen within our Milky Way. The sheer power of this stellar explosion is unfathomable. It’s 50 million light-years away, which means…

One of the largest and oldest (13 billion years) globular cluster of stars near our galaxy – there are hundreds of thousands of stars in there. There are some interesting theories that globular clusters such as this are what remains of smaller galaxies that our Milky Way has consumed – this is just what’s left…

Last night marked Jupiter’s “opposition” – this is the time of year where Jupiter is at its closest point to Earth, and it’s at its biggest and brightest. By a stroke of luck, we had unusually clear skies for this event, and its moon Io was also crossing in front of Jupiter! You can see…

The Dumbbell Nebula (M27) is what’s called a planetary nebula – but it has nothing to do with a planet. This shell of gas was blown out by a dying star; once it started to run out of Hydrogen to burn, it expanded and blew out the gases you see here. The star then collapsed…

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:…

A full moon captured with a Canon T6i DSLR.