Space Jellyfish!

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.

This image really blows my mind – this is the reflection nebula NGC1333 in Perseus. The blue part is reflected gas and dust from the star that’s lighting up – that’s nothing too unusual. But check out the little red blobs above it. Many of those are “Herbig-Haro” objects, formed by jets spewing out from…

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….

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.

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…

There are a lot of stars in this picture; the gases of the Wizard Nebula (formally SH2-142) are the birthplace of those stars, and more are being created even now. It’s located about 7,200 light-years away, and is extremely dim – it took over 9 hours of exposure time to capture this image. Your ability…