Space Jellyfish!

Hope to revisit this under better conditions in the future; but this came out OK considering a bright moon was out the night it was taken. The Pinwheel Galaxy (M101) is near the end of the handle of the Big Dipper in the sky, although physically it is tens of millions of light-years more distant.

At the center of this image is the distant galaxy NGC210, 65 million light-years away within the constellation Cetus. It’s mind-blowing that we can capture an image of something so distant from our backyards, given the right technology. It’s also mind-blowing that we’re looking at light that has been traveling for 65 million years, giving…

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…

On December 21, 2020, something really special happened in the sky: Jupiter and Saturn had an approach so close that it only happens every 800 years or so. They were so close in the sky that to the unaided eye, they looked like a single, bright star. This led many to proclaim it to be…

Every year I image the “Whirlpool Galaxy” (really a pair of galaxies interacting with each other,) and every year it gets a little bit better. This year it was shot from our new observatory, on a newly-tuned mount and with some more image processing experience under my belt. It’s also under slightly darker skies, which…

This is my first attempt at a mosaic… basically stitching together three views of an object that’s normally too large in the sky to fit within the field of view of my telescope. It came out alright! We’ve had a great run of clear nights the past few weeks in Florida, and I’ve invested just…