The Eye of Sauron

This is the Tulip Nebula in Cygnus, but see that shell-like structure just above it, to the right a little? That’s the bow shock wave of Cygnus X-1, a stellar-mass black hole! It’s one of the most powerful X-ray sources in the sky – but don’t worry, our atmosphere protects you from it. 20 hours…

This notoriously dim supernova remnant in Cassiopeia is formally known as CTB1. It took 46 hours of exposure time – most of that narrowband through Hydrogen and Oxygen filters – to pull out this detail. I’m pretty proud of this one; it holds its own amongst the better captures of this object. As usual, I…

This is the Helix Nebula, sometimes also called the “Eye of God” or the “Eye of Sauron”. It’s a planetary nebula, formed by a star blowing off its outer layers of gas before collapsing into the white dwarf you can see at its center. This is thought to be the ultimate fate of our own…

Here’s my latest image of the “Bubble Nebula”, one of my favorite objects in our galaxy. That blue “bubble” is a shell of gas pushed out by the stellar wind of the bright star just right of its center. It’s a big star, 10-20 times larger than our sun. Its radiation is also illuminating and…

This rarely imaged… thing… is the mess left behind by the hottest star in our galaxy: WR-102, one of only four known Oxygen-sequence Wolf-Rayet stars in the Milky Way. It’s already burning Helium – maybe even past that point – and is about to go supernova. It’s located within the rich starfield of Sagittarius, looking…

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…