Horsehead Nebula

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…

The Heart Nebula is a little too big to fit within the field of view of my telescope, but its inner “heart” is interesting in its own right. This is star cluster Melotte 15, formed from the gases within the Heart Nebula – and some of that gas remains, forming interesting clouds and formations where…

Comet C/2021 A1 (Leonard) is approaching the Sun – right now it’s only above the horizon in the early morning hours, but soon it will loop around and be visible in the evening. As of right now, you need a telescope to see it – it’s too dim even for binoculars. But it’s possible it…

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…

It’s been really cloudy lately in Central Florida, so instead of imaging from my driveway, I’ve tried using remote observatories. This particular image was taken using a telescope in Australia, using a service called telescope.live. This is the “Coalsack nebula”, a dark cloud of gas obscuring the Milky Way in the Southern hemisphere. We’re looking…

Narrowband image of the cone-shaped absorption nebula in front of the brighter emission nebula in this interesting region of the Christmas Tree Cluster, about 2,700 light-years away.