The Whirlpool Galaxy

These past couple of nights, I revisited the Wizard Nebula – home of a star cluster about 7,000 light-years away within the constellation Cepheus. This is a false-color image in the “Hubble Palette” where red, green, and blue represent ionized Sulphur, Hydrogen, and Oxygen emissions respectively. Can you see the “wizard”? Hint: he’s lying on…

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…

This object was a real challenge to image. From central Florida, it only rises 13 degrees above the horizon, deep within the light-polluted murk of my Southern sky. Omega Centauri is a Southern hemisphere object, so capturing it from the Northern hemisphere requires effort. It’s worth it though – this is one of the most…

This comet will reach its brightest point a couple of weeks from now, but the skies were clear this morning so I figured I should go for it while I can! The tail’s not as pronounced as I hoped, and processing is a bit sloppy in a couple of spots. But hey, it’s a comet….

Somewhere between 30 and 50 million light-years away, within the constellation Coma Berenices, lies NGC4565 – commonly known as the “Needle Galaxy”. It’s a spiral galaxy, but viewed edge-on – so we see its central bulge and the edge of the galaxy’s disc extending from it. Clouds of dust within the galaxy obscure the middle…

This is M27, the “Dumbbell Nebula,” about 1600 light-years away. It’s what’s called a planetary nebula – not because it has anything to do with planets, but because early observers confused them for planets. In reality it’s far more interesting. This is what’s left over when a medium-sized star runs out of Hydrogen to fuse,…