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.
11 light years away, the “bubble” itself is formed from the solar wind of the large, hot star inside of it. Imaged with narrowband filters.
Formally NGC1570, the “Northern Trifid” is a combination of an emission nebula (the red parts, which is ionized Hydrogen emitting its own light) and a reflection nebula (the blue parts, which is starlight reflecting off dust.) You can also see hints of the dust surrounding this area, which is difficult to capture under the light-polluted…
You’re looking at about 500,000 stars, balled up just outside of our galaxy. They are ancient; about 8 billion years old.
As we enter summer and the Earth starts pointing us back into the plane of the Milky Way and its many nebulas, we’re nearing the end of globular cluster season. M5 seems a fitting one to end on this year; there’s nothing terribly remarkable about it, other than I think it’s pretty. It’s located about…
Somehow I’ve neglected to go back to one of the showcase galaxies of the spring sky with newer equipment and software: M101, the “Pinwheel Galaxy.” Located about 21 million light-years away within Ursa Major, this relatively close galaxy shows lots of active star-forming regions revealed by red HII gas. Those red spots are nebulae in…
Like most globular clusters, M15 lies outside the plane of our galaxy, but is part of it – likely a remnant of the Milky Way’s original formation; a cluster of stars that just never got mixed in with the rest of the galaxy. M15 is one of the oldest, somewhere around 13 billion years old….