Melotte 15

This galaxy is only known as M74. At 32 million light-years away, it’s about as far as you can get for a halfway decent image taken from Earth. It is a “grand design” face-on spiral galaxy. Look closely and you’ll see a few more galaxies in the background that are much more distant, and therefore…

It’s globular cluster season, so here’s another one! M80 is found within the constellation Scorpius, and lies a distant 32,600 light-years away – making it one the small side from our vantage point. It contains several hundred thousand stars, and is one of the denser globular clusters in our galaxy. The faint galaxy in the…

The iconic Horsehead Nebula, near Orion’s belt. Shot in narrowband over two evenings.

Formally IC1396, this cloud of interstellar gas and dust is thought to be an active site of new star formation. And with a little imagination, it kind of looks like an elephant’s trunk. There’s more to it than you see here, but I tried to get an interesting framing. From this angle we see a…

A nebula that looks like its name! Formally SH-308, this bubble of gas 60 light-years across is blown out by a hot Wolf-Rayet star at its center. It’s about 4500 light-years away in the constellation Canis Majoris. It’s quite dim, but if you could see it with bionic vision or something, it would be larger…

This is my first attempt at a mosaic… basically stitching together three views of an object that’s normally too large in the sky to fit within the field of view of my telescope. It came out alright! We’ve had a great run of clear nights the past few weeks in Florida, and I’ve invested just…