A Spooky Knot in the Veil Nebula

I wasn’t able to travel to the path of totality, but here from Florida we still had a partial eclipse. Here’s my shot at its peak, viewed through a special solar telescope using a Hydrogen-Alpha filter to bring out all the roiling detail of the sun’s surface. Check out those prominences around the edge!

Every year I image the “Whirlpool Galaxy” (really a pair of galaxies interacting with each other,) and every year it gets a little bit better. This year it was shot from our new observatory, on a newly-tuned mount and with some more image processing experience under my belt. It’s also under slightly darker skies, which…

On December 21, 2020, something really special happened in the sky: Jupiter and Saturn had an approach so close that it only happens every 800 years or so. They were so close in the sky that to the unaided eye, they looked like a single, bright star. This led many to proclaim it to be…

This portion of the Veil Nebula, commonly called the “Witch’s Broom,” is part of a larger shell of gas known as the Cygnus Loop. It’s gases blown off from a supernova that exploded 10,000 to 20,000 years ago! The rich red and blue colors are real; this is not a false color image. Shot over…

M17 is commonly known as the Swan Nebula or the Omega Nebula. From this angle, I think it looks more like a crab – but “Crab Nebula” was taken! Shot over a hazy summer night, with narrowband filters for the gases of the nebula itself, and RGB natural-color filters for the stars. Presented processed with…

Granted this is only a portion of it, but for the life of me I don’t see a pelican in this thing. But, it’s still pretty. I processed this object two ways: using the “Hubble palette” that maps red, green, and blue to Sulfur, Hydrogen, and Oxygen emissions (that results in the pretty blue one)…