I’ve imaged the Rosette Nebula several times, but this is the first from the dark skies of Central Texas and with some better optics as well. I took a lighter touch on the processing this time, since the data was better – and it results in a smoother, more natural look than previous takes.
This was intended to just be an image of the galaxy M77 in Cetus, but quite a few other galactic photobombers showed up! The annotated image below guides you to the brighter galaxies in this image, but click on it to expand it, and you’ll find many other ones as well that are incomprehensibly distant.
If you point your telescope outside of the Milky Way, you’re almost guaranteed to pick up very distant galaxies, because there are just so many of them out there. This patch of sky inside Cancer is a cluster of galaxies called Abell 671. If you click the image and look at it full size, you’ll…
I’ve imaged M33, the “Triangulum Galaxy” before – but not yet from our new home with darker skies and better equipment. I’m really pleased with how this came out – although M33 is very close to us (2-3 million light-years – that’s close by galactic standards!) it is notoriously difficult to image. Although it’s close,…
One of the largest and oldest (13 billion years) globular cluster of stars near our galaxy – there are hundreds of thousands of stars in there. There are some interesting theories that globular clusters such as this are what remains of smaller galaxies that our Milky Way has consumed – this is just what’s left…
M17 is commonly known as the Swan Nebula or the Omega Nebula. From this angle, I think it looks more like a crab – but “Crab Nebula” was taken! Shot over a hazy summer night, with narrowband filters for the gases of the nebula itself, and RGB natural-color filters for the stars. Presented processed with…
This comet will reach its brightest point a couple of weeks from now, but the skies were clear this morning so I figured I should go for it while I can! The tail’s not as pronounced as I hoped, and processing is a bit sloppy in a couple of spots. But hey, it’s a comet….
