Here we have another globular cluster: M53. You don’t see this one imaged too often, but it’s still quite pretty. I’ve never met a globular cluster I didn’t like.
It’s one of the more distant globular clusters in our galaxy, about 60,000 light-years away.
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.
It’s been really cloudy lately in Central Florida, so instead of imaging from my driveway, I’ve tried using remote observatories. This particular image was taken using a telescope in Australia, using a service called telescope.live. This is the “Coalsack nebula”, a dark cloud of gas obscuring the Milky Way in the Southern hemisphere. We’re looking…
Located about 1,300 light-years away, the Iris Nebula is a reflection nebula – unlike most of the nebulas on this site, it’s not made of ionized gases emitting light of their own. It’s just starlight reflecting off clouds of dust. Reflection nebula are harder to image in light-polluted skies, since the narrowband filters we use…
Both on Earth, and in space! While we prepare for a year or two in California, I trained Scopey von Scopington on the California Nebula for a few nights. Pretty obvious how it got its name! This is a two-panel mosaic, consisting of narrowband SHO data for the nebula and broadband RGB for the stars….
This nebula goes by the unassuming name of SH2-9. It’s part of a larger complex of clouds known as the Rho Ophiuchi complex, but you don’t often see people focusing on this part of it. It’s a challenge to image from my location, as it’s very low in the sky in a light-polluted direction. There…
AKA Abell 1656. There are tens of thousands of galaxies in this portion of the sky; almost everything in this image is an entire galaxy filled with hundreds of millions of stars. Whoah. And they’re hundreds of millions of light-years away. Click and zoom in to explore them all.