The Eye of Sauron

A spiral galaxy almost 40 million light-years away, viewed edge-on. The dust lane in the center of its disk, and central bulge are clearly visible. A couple of its smaller, satellite galaxies can also be seen here.

As we enter summer and the Earth starts pointing us back into the plane of the Milky Way and its many nebulas, we’re nearing the end of globular cluster season. M5 seems a fitting one to end on this year; there’s nothing terribly remarkable about it, other than I think it’s pretty. It’s located about…

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…

This is actually only a portion of a string of galaxies that make up the Virgo supercluster of galaxies, around 50-60 million light-years away.

Last night was hazy, cloudy, and with an almost-full moon that would wash out anything else I could try to image. So, I imaged the Moon itself. Tried out some new techniques; usually you would use a specialized telescope with a specialized camera and specialized software for shooting the Moon, but I wanted to see…

This is my first attempt at a mosaic… basically stitching together three views of an object that’s normally too large in the sky to fit within the field of view of my telescope. It came out alright! We’ve had a great run of clear nights the past few weeks in Florida, and I’ve invested just…