The Sunflower Galaxy

This young star cluster inside the Heart Nebula is lighting up the clouds of gas from which it formed. 3 hours of narrowband exposure from my suburban driveway.

If you’re a fellow amateur astronomer, you might be curious as to how our “live star parties” on our Boldly Going YouTube Channel are produced. The more people doing this, the better! Here’s how it all works behind the scenes, which might give you some ideas on how to produce your own show. The Heart…

That massive sunspot group rivals the size of the one that triggered the Carrington Event in 1859. So far it has kicked off some large coronal mass ejections heading our way, but fortunately nothing on that scale. Let’s hope we just get some pretty auroras from this, and nothing more damaging!

Formally IC1396, this cloud of interstellar gas and dust is thought to be an active site of new star formation. And with a little imagination, it kind of looks like an elephant’s trunk. There’s more to it than you see here, but I tried to get an interesting framing. From this angle we see a…

Our new home has clear views of the sky down to about 15 degrees from the horizon; which means some objects that are normally considered only visible from the Southern hemisphere just peek above our trees for a few hours. One such object is the galaxy Centaurus A; it’s an odd galaxy that looks like…

The Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) appears to be sucking the life out of its companion, NGC 5195. While these galaxies are interacting, they’re not actually connected right now – it just looks that way.