The star next door.

The “Jellyfish Nebula” is a supernova remnant in the constellation Gemini, about 5,000 light-years away. It’s the gas blown off from a star that exploded, sometime between 3,000 and 30,000 years ago – we’re really not sure when it happened. But it makes for quite a spectacle! I was plagued with technical issues while capturing…

If you look at the constellation Orion in the winter night’s sky, the center of Orion’s “sword” is not a star at all – it is the brightest nebula in our sky, M42 or the Great Nebula of Orion. Sitting right on top of it is technically another nebula designated M43, and above that is…

This is IC443, commonly known as the “Jellyfish Nebula” for obvious reasons! IC443 is a supernova remnant about 5,000 light-years away. This is a false-color, narrowband image consisting of a total of 20 hours of exposure time.

I wasn’t able to travel to the path of totality, but here from Florida we still had a partial eclipse. Here’s my shot at its peak, viewed through a special solar telescope using a Hydrogen-Alpha filter to bring out all the roiling detail of the sun’s surface. Check out those prominences around the edge!

Located about 34,000 light-years away within the constellation Canes Venatici, this tight ball of half a million stars formed just outside the disk of our galaxy – and so its stars never got mixed in with it. They’ve just been sitting there for over 11 billion years. One of the prettiest globular clusters in the…

It’s been awhile since I attempted Jupiter and Saturn… years, in fact. But last night was too good to pass up. Jupiter is just past its opposition, and it’s one of its closest approaches to Earth ever. There wasn’t a lot of turbulence in the air late last night, the Great Red Spot was out,…