The Whale and the Hockey Stick

Try saying that three times fast! Fortunately, the “Silver Sliver Galaxy” has a formal name that’s easier to pronounce: NGC 891. It’s about 30 million light-years away, and is thought to be very similar to what our own Milky Way galaxy would look like when viewed edge-on. Explore the wider-field image; click on it for…

Located 63 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices, M91 is part of the Virgo cluster of galaxies – and if you zoom in and explore this image, you’ll find many other galaxies surrounding it, and also far in the distance beyond it.

An interesting emission nebula 30 light years across. Imaged with narrowband filters.

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…

The larger galaxy in this image goes only by the boring name “M106”, but it’s anything but boring. About 23 million light-years away, M106 is pretty similar to Andromeda in its size and brightness. But M106 is a lot weirder. In addition to its slightly warped shape, M106 is the home of a giant water-vapor…

The Rosette Nebula is about 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros. It’s the birthplace of the cluster of stars it contains. While it doesn’t look much like a Rose in this view, the false-color narrowband image below brings out more of its structure. 7 1/2 hours of total exposure time, on New Year’s Eve…