Space Jellyfish!

Here’s another galaxy with no nearby neighbors, and no catchy nicknames either: NGC 3344. It’s about 22.5 million light-years away within the constellation Leo Minor. Although it doesn’t get the love it deserves, it’s a glorious face-on barred spiral galaxy that’s about half the size of our own Milky Way. Explore the space around it,…

This is M17, the “Swan Nebula”. Everyone seems to see something different in it! To me the whole thing looks like a swan seen from the side, but my family sees different birds within it. It’s like seeing shapes in clouds, which makes sense, as this is just a really, really big cloud of gas…

This galaxy is only known as M74. At 32 million light-years away, it’s about as far as you can get for a halfway decent image taken from Earth. It is a “grand design” face-on spiral galaxy. Look closely and you’ll see a few more galaxies in the background that are much more distant, and therefore…

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.

It’s really just a small portion of the Heart Nebula… that kinda looks like a fish. Maybe not the prettiest object in the cosmos, but it reflects a few technical accomplishments for me. About 20 hours of exposure time in total on this. Below I’m presenting it in a false-color “Hubble Palette”, as well as…

Hoag’s Object is the weirdest galaxy I know of; it is a “ring galaxy” – a very rare galaxy type that’s just a galactic core of stars, surrounded by a ring of stars that’s seemingly disconnected from its core. This galaxy has always captured my imagination. Just look at this image from the Hubble Space…