Markarian’s Chain

This portion of the North America Nebula in the constellation – you guessed it – Cygnus, is a giant cloud of ionized gases where new stars are being created. It’s also pretty. These are both false color images, processed a couple of different ways. The first is the classic “Hubble Palette” that maps ionized emissions…

This portion of the Veil Nebula, commonly called the “Witch’s Broom,” is part of a larger shell of gas known as the Cygnus Loop. It’s gases blown off from a supernova that exploded 10,000 to 20,000 years ago! The rich red and blue colors are real; this is not a false color image. Shot over…

This is a weird little cluster of galaxies – there are four in all, and each one is completely different. There’s a weird, S-shaped one that must have been messed up by its neighbors in the past, a somewhat normal-looking spiral galaxy, and elliptical, and another one that’s viewed edge-on. Galaxies that have interacted with…

This week’s target was Thor’s Helmet (NGC 2359), an emission nebula in Canis Major a rather distant 12,000 light-years away. It’s formed by a Wolf-Rayet star in its center, which is a crazy-hot star whose immense stellar wind is bunching up and ionizing the gases around it in these complex patterns. It’ll probably go supernova…

This is a bright, popular nebula deep within the summer Milky Way… but it’s low in the sky, and this is the first time I’ve been able to capture it above the trees. Still, short summer nights and cloudy summer weather present its challenges. Shown processed in the “Hubble palette” and an approximation of its…

I don’t know why the press has latched onto the name “the green comet” for C/2022 E3 (ZTF) – most comets are green, and it’s too dim to see any color at all if you’re viewing it through binoculars or a telescope. But through 2 hours of total exposure time, the colors do emerge, and…