Horsehead Nebula

The Pelican Nebula frankly isn’t a very attractive object as a whole, but if you crop it down to its heart, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on. Look for little puffs in the image, or areas with spikes coming out of them. Those are Herbig-Haro objects – stars that are still in the…

This galaxy is only known as M74. At 32 million light-years away, it’s about as far as you can get for a halfway decent image taken from Earth. It is a “grand design” face-on spiral galaxy. Look closely and you’ll see a few more galaxies in the background that are much more distant, and therefore…

Also in Hercules, M92 is often passed over for its larger and more dazzling neighbor, M13. But M92 is pretty in its own way! It’s also one of the oldest globular clusters in our galaxy (over 11 billion years old) and has some very interesting background galaxies around it too.

There are two different clusters of galaxies in this image – the large galaxy you see is NGC 7331, part of the “Deer Lick Galaxy Group.” The smaller galaxies you see surrounding it (sometimes called “The Fleas”) are actually about ten times further away than NGC 7331. In the corner, you’ll see “Stephan’s Quintet,” a…

There’s a reason I’ve been quiet lately – we sold our house and are in the process of moving to Los Angeles! Also, Florida’s weather hasn’t been terribly cooperative either. The sad news is that we had to leave the observatory behind, and I donated its equipment to the Central Florida Astronomical Society, as LA…

This is actually only a portion of a string of galaxies that make up the Virgo supercluster of galaxies, around 50-60 million light-years away.