The Eagle Nebula

Central Florida wasn’t on the path of the “ring of fire” annular eclipse, but we did get about 60% coverage during the peak of our partial solar eclipse today! I was live-streaming the view at the peak, but managed to capture a quick image for myself shortly afterwards. Lots of good flares and prominences, and…

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…

I’ve imaged M33, the “Triangulum Galaxy” before – but not yet from our new home with darker skies and better equipment. I’m really pleased with how this came out – although M33 is very close to us (2-3 million light-years – that’s close by galactic standards!) it is notoriously difficult to image. Although it’s close,…

This pair of galaxies gets its name from their shapes. Both are viewed edge-on, and from this perspective we can see how a past interaction between the two warped them both. About 6 hours of exposure time from the backyard observatory.

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…

Combining 25 hours of data shot over two years, here’s M64. It’s an odd one, with counter-rotating disks that seem to have funneled all that dust in the center there. They think it’s the result of a merger of two galaxies that were spinning in opposite directions. Located about 17 million light-years away, in the…