The Ghost of Cassiopeia

I trained my telescope at this pair of nebulas in Orion for a total of 10 hours. On the right is the iconic Horsehead nebula – actually a dark cloud of gas in front of the illuminated nebula behind it. To the left is the Flame Nebula. In between, in the upper-left, is the bright…

Spent a couple of nights imaging these distant galaxies; the spiral in the upper-left is NGC2336, and the other is IC467. Galaxies this faint and distant generally don’t have catchy names! NGC2336 is 100 million light-years away. Think about that – you’re looking 100 million years in the past. The light we captured started its…

Like the Bubble Nebula, and Thor’s Helmet, this is formed by the fast stellar wind of the extremely hot star at its heart – which interacts in complex ways from the wind left over from when this star was a red giant. This is roughly 5,000 light-years away. These images were taken over the span…

This portion of the North America Nebula in the constellation – you guessed it – Cygnus, is a giant cloud of ionized gases where new stars are being created. It’s also pretty. These are both false color images, processed a couple of different ways. The first is the classic “Hubble Palette” that maps ionized emissions…

Maybe this isn’t the prettiest object in space, but it’s among the most interesting when you really look at it. The “Embryo Nebula” is a star-forming area, and you can really see it happening here. Those red streaks are Herbig-Haro objects, jets of gas shot out from spinning disks of gas that will become new…

NGC253 is most commonly known as the “Sculptor Galaxy,” because it’s found within the constellation Sculptor. You probably haven’t heard of Sculptor – that’s because it is considered a Southern-hemisphere constellation, and it’s only visible in the US from Southern states such as Florida. It’s also known as the “Silver Coin Galaxy.” It’s part of…