Space Jellyfish!

Now that our new backyard observatory is up and running, and we’re under darker skies than in our previous home, I’m revisiting some galaxies I’ve imaged before to see how things compare. Galaxies are tough… any amount of light pollution or moonlight really limits your ability to capture faint, wispy details. But the less light…

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.

These past couple of nights, I revisited the Wizard Nebula – home of a star cluster about 7,000 light-years away within the constellation Cepheus. This is a false-color image in the “Hubble Palette” where red, green, and blue represent ionized Sulphur, Hydrogen, and Oxygen emissions respectively. Can you see the “wizard”? Hint: he’s lying on…

About 10 million light-years away within the constellation Camelopardalis lies NGC2403. It doesn’t get much love, but it was really an oversight in the famous Messier catalog that defines the most popular deep-sky objects. So let’s give it a little attention, and reflect on the fact that the light we’re seeing from this galaxy started…

Three nearby galaxies: M65, M66, and NGC 3628. All three are spiral galaxies, viewed from different angles. You can guess which one is called the “Hamburger Galaxy” 🙂

This galaxy is truly one of a kind, at least among that galaxies we have found. It’s a “polar ring galaxy,” probably the result of an unusual collision that left the core lenticular galaxy surrounded by the disk of another galaxy that it merged with. It’s a small, dim object, and just barely detectable from…