Another Go at the Pelican Nebula

Granted this is only a portion of it, but for the life of me I don’t see a pelican in this thing. But, it’s still pretty. I processed this object two ways: using the “Hubble palette” that maps red, green, and blue to Sulfur, Hydrogen, and Oxygen emissions (that results in the pretty blue one)…

Imaging the planets requires completely different techniques and equipment than deep-sky stuff, and it’s something I’m not really good at yet. What matters the most is the seeing conditions – how stable the atmosphere is. A big part of taking good planetary images is just having the perseverance to get out there whenever the seeing…

Globular clusters are mysterious objects – they are dense clusters of stars, some containing hundreds of thousands of them. And they’re not within the plane of the Milky Way galaxy; they are scattered around it. How they formed is a bit of a mystery. Did they form with our galaxy, or are they the cores…

M13, the great globular cluster in Hercules. You can see some of its interesting neighbors, including the galaxy NGC 6207 in the lower-left. While M13 itself is 25,000 light-years away just above our galactic plane, NGC 6207 is 37 million light-years distant. About halfway between the two, the galaxy IC 4617 is also visible –…

Last weekend, I hosted an astrophotography workshop on lunar photography for our local astronomy club. Tonight the skies finally cleared, and I got to apply what was learned! Here’s our lunar neighbor, in hi-res glory.

Commonly known as the “Tadpoles Nebula” for obvious reasons, this is somehow my first time imaging this one! Shot in narrowband / Hubble palette remotely from Starfront Observatories in Texas. Focusing in on the “Tadpoles” makes for a more interesting image, but here’s the wider field shot it was cropped from, which is also fun…