Globular Cluster M3

This morning, my cat woke me up at 3 AM, and I noticed it was clear outside. But, the sun would start rising in just a couple of hours, so doing some super-long-exposure shot of a faint nebula wasn’t in the cards. However, globular clusters don’t take long to image, as they are relatively bright…

The three galaxies in the constellation Leo (M65, M66, and NGC3628) are about 31 million light-years away. Each one is being seen from a different angle; the one viewed edge-on is also known as the “Hamburger Galaxy”. Each has been interacting with each other, and distorting the shapes of these galaxies through the complex dance…

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…

Taken just prior to Halloween in 2018, the southeastern knot of the Eastern Veil Nebula takes on a ghostly appearance when imaged in the Hubble palette with narrowband filters.

Located about 2,400 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus, the “Elephant’s Trunk Nebula” has a distinct “Pillars of Creation” vibe when viewed as a long-exposure, narrowband image in the style of Hubble. Like the “Pillars of Creation” (the Eagle Nebula,) the Elephant’s Trunk is also an area of star formation, containing some young, newly-formed stars….

There’s a big cluster of galaxies within Virgo; it’s just filthy with them. People usually image a different part of it, but I found another interesting area that’s often overlooked. The grand-design spiral at the bottom is NGC5364; it’s about 55 million light-years away. The annotated image identifies its buddies.