The Needle Galaxy

This is actually only a portion of a string of galaxies that make up the Virgo supercluster of galaxies, around 50-60 million light-years away.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see a ghost leaving a trail of ectoplasm in this cloud of Hydrogen gas, lit up by the bright star Navi. To keep with a spooky and ethereal theme, I photographed this object in monochrome using only a Hydrogen-alpha filter.

Narrowband image of the cone-shaped absorption nebula in front of the brighter emission nebula in this interesting region of the Christmas Tree Cluster, about 2,700 light-years away.

Located about 2,400 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus, the “Elephant’s Trunk Nebula” has a distinct “Pillars of Creation” vibe when viewed as a long-exposure, narrowband image in the style of Hubble. Like the “Pillars of Creation” (the Eagle Nebula,) the Elephant’s Trunk is also an area of star formation, containing some young, newly-formed stars….

The “California Nebula” (NGC1499) does actually kinda look like California, if you look at the whole thing. But the whole thing is too big in the sky to fit within the field of view of my telescope. So, here’s an interesting portion of it near one of its ends at least. From this angle, it…

You’re looking at about 500,000 stars, balled up just outside of our galaxy. They are ancient; about 8 billion years old.