Cone Nebula

As with any form of photography, getting a good shot is largely about being in the right place at the right time. When it comes to photographing the planets, sometimes that means getting up at a painful hour. Both Mars and Uranus are nearing “opposition” – the point where they are directly across from Earth…

I’ve imaged this one before, but I keep coming back to it because I just can’t believe its golden color is real. But even after applying all I’ve learned about color calibration – I can say pretty definitely that these are its true colors. It’s also benefited from advances in image processing software, making the…

These past couple of nights, I revisited the Wizard Nebula – home of a star cluster about 7,000 light-years away within the constellation Cepheus. This is a false-color image in the “Hubble Palette” where red, green, and blue represent ionized Sulphur, Hydrogen, and Oxygen emissions respectively. Can you see the “wizard”? Hint: he’s lying on…

M13 is one of the most photogenic and popular globular clusters, and it’s pretty easy to see with nothing more than a pair of binoculars if you know where to look! But it’s even prettier with a long exposure – this is about 3 hours of exposure time. Blow it up to full size, and…

The galaxies NGC4567 and NGC4568 are colliding 60 million light-years away. This is really pushing the resolution limits here; we had good “seeing” last night meaning not a lot of turbulence to smear out the light reaching my telescope, and I carefully collimated and calibrated things prior to imaging last night. About as good as…

The amateur astronomy community is pretty excited at Mars lately – it’s nearing its closest approach to Earth right now, and this one’s even closer than usual. That means some of the best viewing and imaging opportunities for the Red Planet you’ll ever get. When the skies clear and the atmosphere is still, it’s an…