Hey everyone, been a while. For those who are new here I thought I’d make this post to explain who I am, and what I’m doing! Also I’ll answer any questions you have in the comments.

My names Bray, I started doing astronomy at the age of 14 from my backyard in Arizona. I went to school for aerospace engineering and when I got out of school in 2020 realized my dream job wasn’t going to happen, so I decided to go full in on my astrophotography by teaching and making prints.

In September of 2022 I decided to completely change the way I do astrophotography, and I began to survey the night sky in search of new objects. It was back then when I realized there is a huge lack of scientific knowledge about the presence of ionized oxygen plasma in our galaxy. Specifically the color Oiii, which is a nice blue/green color. This gas emission line is heavily tied to high mass stellar physics, particularly supernovae and their remnants, as well as special planetary nebulae.

It was at this time that you could take an Oiii filtered image anywhere in the sky away from known nebulae, and likely be the first human to ever do so. How exciting is that! To go and look where nobody has before with questionable odds of success. Many many hours would be spent with failure, but it has been worth it in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

So after a year of searching what have we learned? Firstly there are many undocumented supernova remnants, things that have been hidden for all time because they aren’t bright in known wavelengths. There are also lots of unknown Oiii bright PN, even in places far away from the galactic plane. There is also a large number of objects we can’t explain, and for those a special catalog has been created, the OO catalogue.

My dream having studied aerospace was always to work on the exploration of space. In a weird roundabout way, somehow I’ve gotten to! (I should’ve gotten an astrophysics degree).

I hope this helps explain what I’m doing; and why all my images have blue nebulae in them now!