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 his back in this image.
For fun, here’s a version with the stars removed using AI software:
Taken just prior to Halloween in 2018, the southeastern knot of the Eastern Veil Nebula takes on a ghostly appearance when imaged in the Hubble palette with narrowband filters.
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.
Check out our online courses, and learn the secrets behind the images on this site! Select one to learn more.
Our new house has plenty of land, reasonably dark skies, and a reasonable homeowner’s association… so of course I had to try building an observatory! It may sound crazy, but it does offer a lot of advantages: I no longer have to set up my telescope, wait for dark, polar align it, and run a…
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…
This solar cycle has been quite a bit more active than forecast. It motivated me to up my game a little bit with solar imaging; this is my first image with a “double stack” setup that results in narrower filtering on the Hydrogen-alpha emissions from the sun. Lots and lots of prominences, filaments, and sunspots…
