This is a challenging and faint object, only discovered in 2011 by an amateur astronomer! The “squid” is believed to be doubly-ionized Oxygen pushed out from a hot triple-star system at its center, sitting within that larger region of red ionized Hydrogen. Whatever its nature, it’s one of the most unique objects in the night sky.
Over 53 hours of exposure time were required to unveil this image.
I’ve wanted to image the “Fox Fur Nebula” for awhile now – it’s pretty obvious where it is in this image! Within the same field of view is the Cone Nebula (near the bottom.) It’s all an area of gas within the Christmas Tree Cluster, which is an open cluster of stars that kind of…
The Helix Nebula is also known as the Eye of Sauron or the Eye of God.
Within the constellation Corvus, two galaxies are close to merging together into one… leaving two tails behind from the original galaxies. About 45 million light-years away. Our own galaxy may suffer a similar fate, should it collide with the Andromeda Galaxy in the distant future.
NGC206 is an unusual object. It’s a cluster of stars, which in itself is not unusual at all… but it’s in ANOTHER GALAXY. The Andromeda Galaxy, to be precise. The fact that we can see it so clearly, two and a half million light-years away, boggles the mind. It’s that cluster of blue stars near…
It’s not the title of a children’s story – it’s a pair of galaxies 30 million light-years away that look like, well, a whale and a hockey stick. Officially their names are NGC 4631 and NGC 4656.
This year, I revisited M51, the “Whirlpool Galaxy.” Having seem some images of this with hundreds of hours of exposure time that pulled out features I never knew were there, I wanted to give it a go myself. This image incorporates over 139 hours of exposure time – but honestly, it doesn’t look much different…