
Similar Posts

The Eagle Nebula – sans stars
This image was something of a happy accident – I spent a night capturing narrowband data on M16, the Eagle Nebula (home of the famous “pillars of creation”.) Of course I had to try reproducing the iconic Hubble image as best I could, but the color palette they use results in big, ugly, magenta-colored stars….

Mars and Uranus
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…

The Eagle Nebula
A wider shot of the Eagle Nebula, with the famous “pillars of creation” in its center.

M14: A Golden Ball of Stars
This morning, my cat woke me up at 3 AM, and I noticed it was clear outside. But, the sun would start rising in just a couple of hours, so doing some super-long-exposure shot of a faint nebula wasn’t in the cards. However, globular clusters don’t take long to image, as they are relatively bright…

The “Cygnus Wall” of Star Formation
This portion of the North America Nebula in the constellation – you guessed it – Cygnus, is a giant cloud of ionized gases where new stars are being created. It’s also pretty. These are both false color images, processed a couple of different ways. The first is the classic “Hubble Palette” that maps ionized emissions…

Another Go at the Pelican Nebula
The Pelican Nebula frankly isn’t a very attractive object as a whole, but if you crop it down to its heart, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on. Look for little puffs in the image, or areas with spikes coming out of them. Those are Herbig-Haro objects – stars that are still in the…