The star next door.

In these short summer nights, I want to take advantage of every moment of darkness. Right now, the galaxy M100 is up in the hours before midnight, and the “Tulip Nebula” – formally SH2-101 – rises just as M100 sets. So for this past week, I’ve been imaging both objects. But no more clear skies…

Within the constellation Corvus, two galaxies are close to merging together into one… leaving two tails behind from the original galaxies. About 45 million light-years away. Our own galaxy may suffer a similar fate, should it collide with the Andromeda Galaxy in the distant future.

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.

I trained my telescope at this pair of nebulas in Orion for a total of 10 hours. On the right is the iconic Horsehead nebula – actually a dark cloud of gas in front of the illuminated nebula behind it. To the left is the Flame Nebula. In between, in the upper-left, is the bright…

That twisted-up galaxy at the top is NGC 3718. We don’t actually know if it’s a spiral or a lenticular galaxy, because the galaxy below it, NGC 3729, appears to have warped it beyond recognition when it passed by it. Also look for the cluster of five more distant galaxies just to the right of…

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…