A first look of the season at the 3 brilliant stars of Orion’s Belt. From left to right in this image their names are Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. Seen in a consistently spaced line from our vantage point on Earth, Alnilam (the center star) is actually more than 700 lightyears further away than the others. It is by far the brightest, a supergiant that is 375,000 times more luminous than our own sun. Burning a brilliant blue, they are one of the most iconic and recognizable sights of our winter skies.

I captured this image with a short 15 second exposures over 15 minutes in natural colors as our eyes would see them including the surrounding nebulae if they were sensitive enough.

I hope you like it and have a great day!

1,793 lightyears from Earth an young, open cluster of brilliant stars graces the sky right next to the Great Orion Nebula. It’s easy to overlook these simple, gorgeous sights when they sit so close to an object like M42. I spent some time with my largest telescope to be able to capture and share this view with you.

I hope you like it and have a great day!

Quick sneak peek at the data I am collecting to capture M104, also known as the Sombrero Galaxy, in greater detail than I ever have before. This is just the first 14 hours of Luminance data, but I’m so excited about the details that are starting to emerge. I find this object to be so beguiling!

I hope you like it and have a great day!

When people in the year 1054 witnessed the sudden appearance of a “daytime star”, they didn’t know what to make of it. It faded over several months, but was recorded in literature by a handful of ancient astronomers and their notes have reached us today.

This is the aftermath, known as Messier 1 as the first entry in Charles Messier’s catalogue of crap in the sky that wasn’t comets. Also known as the Crab Nebula since a guy in 1832 looked at it through a telescope and felt it looked like a crab from what he could make out in a hand sketch.

Now we know it is the expanding shell of the supernova witnessed in 1054, still rapidly expanding and 11 lightyears across. It is one of the most epically colorful objects I have seen in our sky. This is a true color image, color calibrated to be shown in natural colors with the saturation turned up so that we can see them.

How incredibly terrible, violent, and beautiful all at once! This is how the raw material for new planets and life gets formed, and it is amazing to witness it!

I hope you like it and have a fantastic day!

10 days ago, Koichi Itagaki, an amateur astronomer in Japan, was the first to discover a new supernova in M101, also known as the Pinwheel galaxy. 21 million lightyears away from Earth, a star in one of the outer spiral arms went supernova, and over the past 10 days has been temporarily outshining all of the other stars in its home galaxy.

I spent the past week gathering data on it with my largest telescope and am excited about how it is turning out. The supernova is visible in my image here as the brightest star (by far) in the frame.

Amazing to witness the power of an explosion of this magnitude, visible from 21 million lightyears away with even basic amateur equipment here on Earth.

I hope you like it and have a great day!

This is the most detailed image I’ve ever captured of NGC 6888, also known as the Crescent Nebula. One of the most beguiling objects of our summertime skies in the northern hemisphere, it sits 5,000 lightyears from Earth and is the spectacular display of the final stages of a giant, dying star. At its core 250,000 to 400,000 years ago, Wolf-Rayet star WR 136 shed its outer layers in successive shockwaves when it entered its red giant phase. In a successive stage, intense fast moving super energized stellar wind collided with these expanding outer layers causing them to ionize and glow.

I captured this in an HOO palette, which shows complex pinks and reds and purples of ionized hydrogen together with the beautiful blues of the outer shell of ionized oxygen. I also love the subtle details that came out when capturing this with one of my larger scopes (Planewave CDK17), including the small dark nebulae that lay in the foreground.

I’ve been very busy recently with a surprise project (more details soon) so haven’t had a chance to post recently, but I have been imaging every clear night and have a serious backlog of content to share with you.

I hope you like it and have a great day!

This is NGC 4490, also known as the Cocoon Galaxy. Its distance of 25 million lightyears away from Earth makes it difficult to tease out all the details, but using my largest scope I was able to pull out some dark dust lanes and many pink areas of intense star formation. It is in a tidal dance with a smaller companion galaxy (NGC 4485) seen in my image as well, and their interactions have made it a “starburst galaxy” with up to 30x the rate of star formation in our own Milky Way.

I hope you like it and have a great day!

I’ve also spent the past week opening up a wider field of view surrounding the Crescent Nebula to go with my deep field image that I shared recently. I’ll keep opening this up until I get to a big swath of the sky to share with you, but even in this image you can already see some of the majestic clouds of interstellar material forming complex structures amidst the countless stars as we look into the band of our own Milky Way.

I captured this in the “Hubble palette” which maps ionized Sulfur, Hydrogen, and Oxygen to red, green, and blue respectively.

I hope you like it and have a great day!

This is my best view yet of the massive, face-on spiral galaxy M101. This galaxy is massive. Measuring 170,000 lightyears in diameter, it is nearly twice the size of our own Milky Way. Earlier this year I spent weeks collecting this two panel mosaic of it using my largest telescope, and it happened to coincide with the emergence of a new supernova within it that can be seen here and in an earlier post that I made with a smaller crop of this data.

I find it hard to get my mind around the scope of this magnificent monster. What do you think?

Third Quarter

The left of the moon appears illuminated and visible,while the left half appears dark.

Waning Crescent

A small sliver of the illuminated side of the moon is visible on the left side, appearing to shrink in size.