M17 is commonly known as the Swan Nebula or the Omega Nebula. From this angle, I think it looks more like a crab – but “Crab Nebula” was taken!
Shot over a hazy summer night, with narrowband filters for the gases of the nebula itself, and RGB natural-color filters for the stars. Presented processed with and without stars below.
Globular clusters are mysterious objects – they are dense clusters of stars, some containing hundreds of thousands of them. And they’re not within the plane of the Milky Way galaxy; they are scattered around it. How they formed is a bit of a mystery. Did they form with our galaxy, or are they the cores…
Here’s my latest image of the “Bubble Nebula”, one of my favorite objects in our galaxy. That blue “bubble” is a shell of gas pushed out by the stellar wind of the bright star just right of its center. It’s a big star, 10-20 times larger than our sun. Its radiation is also illuminating and…
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…
A spiral galaxy almost 40 million light-years away, viewed edge-on. The dust lane in the center of its disk, and central bulge are clearly visible. A couple of its smaller, satellite galaxies can also be seen here.
Imaged in narrowband filters from my suburban driveway. This object lives up to its name with the right color mappings!
Officially called M63, this spiral galaxy about 30 million light-years away is part of the same group as the Whirlpool Galaxy.
