Hope to revisit this under better conditions in the future; but this came out OK considering a bright moon was out the night it was taken. The Pinwheel Galaxy (M101) is near the end of the handle of the Big Dipper in the sky, although physically it is tens of millions of light-years more distant.
11 light years away, the “bubble” itself is formed from the solar wind of the large, hot star inside of it. Imaged with narrowband filters.
Globular clusters are mysterious objects – they are dense clusters of stars, some containing hundreds of thousands of them. And they’re not within the plane of the Milky Way galaxy; they are scattered around it. How they formed is a bit of a mystery. Did they form with our galaxy, or are they the cores…
A progression of photos taken at 15-minute intervals from 10:30 PM to 12:15 AM on the evening of Jan 20-21, 2019. Click to zoom in – there’s a lot of detail!
Johan Bode discovered both Bode’s Galaxy (M81, on the left) and the Cigar Galaxy (M82, on the right.) Look closely and you’ll see many other, more distant galaxies in the background as well.
Located 63 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices, M91 is part of the Virgo cluster of galaxies – and if you zoom in and explore this image, you’ll find many other galaxies surrounding it, and also far in the distance beyond it.
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…
