The “Leo Trio” of galaxies

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.

A spiral galaxy almost 40 million light-years away, viewed edge-on. The dust lane in the center of its disk, and central bulge are clearly visible. A couple of its smaller, satellite galaxies can also be seen here.

I’ve imaged M33, the “Triangulum Galaxy” before – but not yet from our new home with darker skies and better equipment. I’m really pleased with how this came out – although M33 is very close to us (2-3 million light-years – that’s close by galactic standards!) it is notoriously difficult to image. Although it’s close,…

Here’s IC417, commonly known as the “Spider Nebula.” Just outside of the frame is a smaller one called the “Fly Nebula,” but my field of view isn’t quite big enough to capture them together! It’s about 10,000 light-years away, in the constellation Auriga. Imaged over 15 hours; narrowband nebula blended with RGB stars.

This image contains a few things! At the bottom is the Cone Nebula, at the upper-right is the “Fox Fur Nebula”, and in the middle is the “Christmas Tree” star cluster… you have to flip the image upside down to see that one. It’s a gorgeous region of active star formation in the constellation Monoceros….

AKA Abell 1656. There are tens of thousands of galaxies in this portion of the sky; almost everything in this image is an entire galaxy filled with hundreds of millions of stars. Whoah. And they’re hundreds of millions of light-years away. Click and zoom in to explore them all.