It doesn’t take much imagination to see a ghost leaving a trail of ectoplasm in this cloud of Hydrogen gas, lit up by the bright star Navi. To keep with a spooky and ethereal theme, I photographed this object in monochrome using only a Hydrogen-alpha filter.
It’s not the title of a children’s story – it’s a pair of galaxies 30 million light-years away that look like, well, a whale and a hockey stick. Officially their names are NGC 4631 and NGC 4656.
M13 is one of the most photogenic and popular globular clusters, and it’s pretty easy to see with nothing more than a pair of binoculars if you know where to look! But it’s even prettier with a long exposure – this is about 3 hours of exposure time. Blow it up to full size, and…
Combining 25 hours of data shot over two years, here’s M64. It’s an odd one, with counter-rotating disks that seem to have funneled all that dust in the center there. They think it’s the result of a merger of two galaxies that were spinning in opposite directions. Located about 17 million light-years away, in the…
That massive sunspot group rivals the size of the one that triggered the Carrington Event in 1859. So far it has kicked off some large coronal mass ejections heading our way, but fortunately nothing on that scale. Let’s hope we just get some pretty auroras from this, and nothing more damaging!
This is the Tulip Nebula in Cygnus, but see that shell-like structure just above it, to the right a little? That’s the bow shock wave of Cygnus X-1, a stellar-mass black hole! It’s one of the most powerful X-ray sources in the sky – but don’t worry, our atmosphere protects you from it. 20 hours…
At the center of this image is the distant galaxy NGC210, 65 million light-years away within the constellation Cetus. It’s mind-blowing that we can capture an image of something so distant from our backyards, given the right technology. It’s also mind-blowing that we’re looking at light that has been traveling for 65 million years, giving…
