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Late-night planetary imaging.
Imaging the planets requires completely different techniques and equipment than deep-sky stuff, and it’s something I’m not really good at yet. What matters the most is the seeing conditions – how stable the atmosphere is. A big part of taking good planetary images is just having the perseverance to get out there whenever the seeing…

Summertime weather hiatus…
Yeah, it’s been a couple of months since we’ve done a live star party online, or posted any new pictures. That’s just summertime in Central Florida for you – it’s been too cloudy to do any imaging or observing. The skies should start clearing up more in a couple of months, and we have every…

Horsehead Nebula
The iconic Horsehead Nebula, near Orion’s belt. Shot in narrowband over two evenings.

The Antennae Galaxies
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.

The Iris Nebula
Located about 1,300 light-years away, the Iris Nebula is a reflection nebula – unlike most of the nebulas on this site, it’s not made of ionized gases emitting light of their own. It’s just starlight reflecting off clouds of dust. Reflection nebula are harder to image in light-polluted skies, since the narrowband filters we use…

Coma Berenices Galaxy Cluster
AKA Abell 1656. There are tens of thousands of galaxies in this portion of the sky; almost everything in this image is an entire galaxy filled with hundreds of millions of stars. Whoah. And they’re hundreds of millions of light-years away. Click and zoom in to explore them all.