
Similar Posts

The Bubble Nebula
11 light years away, the “bubble” itself is formed from the solar wind of the large, hot star inside of it. Imaged with narrowband filters.

NGC2903 feels lonely.
It’s a good thing galaxies don’t have feelings; they’re just collections of billions of stars. Because NGC 2903 would need therapy. It has no cute nickname like other galaxies; it’s just NGC 2903. And it has no galactic neighbors; most galaxies are gravitationally bound to other galaxies in their local group or cluster, but NGC…

Revisiting the Northern Pinwheel Galaxy (M101)
Somehow I’ve neglected to go back to one of the showcase galaxies of the spring sky with newer equipment and software: M101, the “Pinwheel Galaxy.” Located about 21 million light-years away within Ursa Major, this relatively close galaxy shows lots of active star-forming regions revealed by red HII gas. Those red spots are nebulae in…

Globular Cluster M3
You’re looking at about 500,000 stars, balled up just outside of our galaxy. They are ancient; about 8 billion years old.

The Hickson 44 Galaxy Group
This is a weird little cluster of galaxies – there are four in all, and each one is completely different. There’s a weird, S-shaped one that must have been messed up by its neighbors in the past, a somewhat normal-looking spiral galaxy, and elliptical, and another one that’s viewed edge-on. Galaxies that have interacted with…

Playing with Pac-Man
This is NGC281, or the “Pac-Man” nebula. I think it’s one of those objects that might look a little like its name if you’re viewing it through a big telescope in a dark sky, but takes on a totally different character in long-exposure, narrowband images such as this. This is a total of 13 hours…