The Needle Galaxy

M104 is known as the “Sombrero Galaxy” due to its visual appearance – but a deep, long-exposure image reveals its true structure. It’s a lenticular galaxy about 30 million light-years away, about 30% the size of our own Milky Way galaxy.

Formally SH2-155, the Cave Nebula lies about 2,400 light-years away within the constellation Cepheus. It’s part of a much larger region of gas and dust (called a molecular cloud). This region is mostly ionized Hydrogen, but there’s just enough Oxygen – blue in this image – to make for a pretty picture. Capturing that Oxygen…

The larger galaxy in this image goes only by the boring name “M106”, but it’s anything but boring. About 23 million light-years away, M106 is pretty similar to Andromeda in its size and brightness. But M106 is a lot weirder. In addition to its slightly warped shape, M106 is the home of a giant water-vapor…

It’s not the title of a children’s story – it’s a pair of galaxies 30 million light-years away that look like, well, a whale and a hockey stick. Officially their names are NGC 4631 and NGC 4656.

We recently obtained a new telescope for observing the planets, and we had our first good conditions for planetary imaging this morning! This is the best image of Jupiter I’ve ever gotten, and I’m hopeful that it will be even better once it gets closer to Earth in a couple of Months. Saturn’s not looking…

The “Jellyfish Nebula” is a supernova remnant in the constellation Gemini, about 5,000 light-years away. It’s the gas blown off from a star that exploded, sometime between 3,000 and 30,000 years ago – we’re really not sure when it happened. But it makes for quite a spectacle! I was plagued with technical issues while capturing…