The Moon

AKA Abell 1656. There are tens of thousands of galaxies in this portion of the sky; almost everything in this image is an entire galaxy filled with hundreds of millions of stars. Whoah. And they’re hundreds of millions of light-years away. Click and zoom in to explore them all.

This is IC342, located about 10 million light-years away. If it were anywhere else in the sky, it would be visible to the naked eye – but it lies behind the disk of our Milky Way galaxy, obscuring the view. This image is the result of 22 hours of total exposure time to try and…

There are two different clusters of galaxies in this image – the large galaxy you see is NGC 7331, part of the “Deer Lick Galaxy Group.” The smaller galaxies you see surrounding it (sometimes called “The Fleas”) are actually about ten times further away than NGC 7331. In the corner, you’ll see “Stephan’s Quintet,” a…

Imaged in narrowband filters from my suburban driveway. This object lives up to its name with the right color mappings!

Also in Hercules, M92 is often passed over for its larger and more dazzling neighbor, M13. But M92 is pretty in its own way! It’s also one of the oldest globular clusters in our galaxy (over 11 billion years old) and has some very interesting background galaxies around it too.

This image was something of a happy accident – I spent a night capturing narrowband data on M16, the Eagle Nebula (home of the famous “pillars of creation”.) Of course I had to try reproducing the iconic Hubble image as best I could, but the color palette they use results in big, ugly, magenta-colored stars….