Thor’s Helmet
An interesting emission nebula 30 light years across. Imaged with narrowband filters.
An interesting emission nebula 30 light years across. Imaged with narrowband filters.
Hoag’s Object is the weirdest galaxy I know of; it is a “ring galaxy” – a very rare galaxy type that’s just a galactic core of stars, surrounded by a ring of stars that’s seemingly disconnected from its core. This galaxy has always captured my imagination. Just look at this image from the Hubble Space…
Last night marked Jupiter’s “opposition” – this is the time of year where Jupiter is at its closest point to Earth, and it’s at its biggest and brightest. By a stroke of luck, we had unusually clear skies for this event, and its moon Io was also crossing in front of Jupiter! You can see…
It’s been awhile since I attempted Jupiter and Saturn… years, in fact. But last night was too good to pass up. Jupiter is just past its opposition, and it’s one of its closest approaches to Earth ever. There wasn’t a lot of turbulence in the air late last night, the Great Red Spot was out,…
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.
Imaging the planets requires completely different techniques and equipment than deep-sky stuff, and it’s something I’m not really good at yet. What matters the most is the seeing conditions – how stable the atmosphere is. A big part of taking good planetary images is just having the perseverance to get out there whenever the seeing…
Located about 34,000 light-years away within the constellation Canes Venatici, this tight ball of half a million stars formed just outside the disk of our galaxy – and so its stars never got mixed in with it. They’ve just been sitting there for over 11 billion years. One of the prettiest globular clusters in the…