Imágenes de 2025

  • IC 443 - Jellyfish Nebula

    I was excited to see how this one would turn out, as with the RASA, I didn't normally target these kinds of objects. Supernova remnants tend to be too small for a wide-field setup, but this object at 5 thousand light years is close enough to subtend an angle of 50 arcminutes in the sky, which was large enough for me to capture in some detail. The nebula itself is approx. 70 light years across.
    A supernova remnant is what you get when a star explodes. Usually the debris from such an explosion will expand outwards in the form of a shell of material. The shape of the shell will depend on the dynamics of the explosion, and the influence of other objects in the vicinity. Radiation from stars can interact with the expanding shock wave, producing a complex mess of additional shock waves and magnetic fields that reverberate around the nebula. All of this activity produces twists, folds and filaments that can sometimes resemble the sinewy threads of organic tissue. Often the explosion leaves behind a dense, rapidly spinning neutron star, called a pulsar.
    The object shown here bears a striking resemblance to the delicate form of a jellyfish, swimming through the cosmos. It does, in fact, contain a pulsar, situated in the top left section of the nebula - i.e. the bell-shaped part of the jellyfish. The creature's graceful anatomy has been shaped over time by interactions with nearby molecular clouds, such as the huge hydrogen wall that looks like it's protruding from the top of the jellyfish.
    Explosions of the kind that gave birth to the Jellyfish are the means by which atoms are manufactured and distributed into the cosmos - a process essential for the development of planetary systems and the evolution of life. Without these nebulae, we wouldn't exist.

     

  • M42 - Great Orion Nebula

    Ok, I know what you're thinking. Why did it take me so long to photograph the Orion Nebula? At a little over a thousand light years away, it is the closest big star factory to Earth, making it one of the brightest deep space objects in the sky. You can get a pretty good image even with short exposure times, and with good eyesight and clear skies it can even be seen with the naked eye, as a hazy patch of light surrounding the middle star in Orion's sword.
    The challenge, of course, is to wait for the right season when Orion is visible in the night sky, and not obscured by a tree, or a neighbor's house. And then you have to wait for the clouds to clear. Fortunately, conditions were right for me around the end of November 2024 to collect about 7 hours of data for this photo.
    It's a mesmerizing sight, with all of those swirling, organic-like patterns. You can find many close up views of this region taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in which you can see what are called proto-planetary disks. These are new planetary systems in the making, giving us a glimpse of what our own solar system might have looked like in the olden days, as the planets formed.

     

  • NGC 1491 Fossil Footprint Nebula

    The Fossil Footprint is an emission nebula in Perseus that appears relatively small in the sky, due to its distance from Earth. There seem to be conflicting estimates about how far away it is - I am finding a range from about 10 to 12 thousand light years. Either way this image is zoomed in quite a bit compared to my other wide field shots.
    The nebula contains a number of massive stars whose UV radiation ionizes the hydrogen clouds making them glow brightly. As with other emission nebulae we've seen, there are some beautiful patterns sculpted into the clouds by the radiation pressure from the stellar winds. I especially love the bright yellow walls at the top, formed when gases are compressed by shock waves - real gates of heaven stuff! It's supposed to bear some resemblance to a footprint, but I'm not seeing it.

     

  • IC 434 - Horsehead Nebula

    My first photograph of the iconic Horsehead Nebula, an extraordinary sight that never gets old. Probably this is the nebula that most resembles its name, with the dark horsehead cloud clearly silhouetted against a beautiful scarlet curtain of ionized hydrogen alpha. The bright star directly overhead is Sigma Orionis, which I believe supplies the ionizing radiation for the dramatic background lighting.
    You can find the Horsehead in the same part of the sky as the Orion nebula which I posted earlier in 2025. It's relative close to us, at just fifteen hundred light years, and thus quite amenable to being photographed. Requiring minimal processing, it looks like a work of art right out of the gate.

     

  • NGC 2174 - Monkey Head

    Seen here is the Monkey Head nebula, at a distance of 6,400 light years from Earth. I think I can barely see how it might resemble the profile of a monkey, looking toward the left side of the image, although it's not hugely convincing. Like many of my other images, this is an emission nebula consisting mostly of ionized hydrogen, and is an active star formation source. You can find this in the Orion constellation, fairly close in the sky to the Jellyfish which was one of my January 2025 postings. If I'm honest, this nebula doesn't really hold a candle to some of the other more spectacular nebulae I've captured recently - at least not in a wide field view like this. However, there are some amazing close up photos of this region taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, so I may revisit the Monkey Head at some future time for a narrower shot with higher magnification.

     

  • C7

    This is C7, a spiral galaxy 12 million light years from here. It's a little smaller than our own galaxy, with a diameter of 80,000 light years. Seen from Earth, C7 is tilted at a rather pleasant angle toward us, which I think accentuates its lovely spiral arms. Plenty of star formation happening here, as evidenced by the abundance of pink specks, areas of ionized hydrogen that can produce thousands of stars in just a few million years. Newborn stars produce their own ionizing radiation that then helps to reshape the nebulous gases ultimately triggering yet more star formation.

     

  • M106

    Another spiral, M106, at approx. 24 million light years distance. This galaxy has an active core, with a supermassive black hole at the center. It's larger than our galaxy, about 150,000 light years across. We're seeing it at a pretty shallow angle - almost edge on. On top of the usual spiral galactic pattern, M106 has an extra set of arms which are not composed of stars, but rather energized gases. They are very faint, and I don't see them in this image, so I'll need to revisit this galaxy and work on it some more. These extra arms are thought to be the result of all the turmoil caused by the galaxy's central black hole.
    There are a few other galaxies noticeable here in addition to M106. To the right side, next to the bright stars, there is NGC 4217 - an edge-on spiral 60 million light years from us. Near M106, just off the top right corner, is NGC 4248 - another edge-on spiral at 24 million light years. There is a nice Hubble close up of this one that looks like a beautiful patch of sparkling stardust.
    At the top is NGC 4220, another spiral about half the size of our galaxy at 63 million light years distance. Zooming in on the full resolution image you can make out dozens of additional galaxies in this field of view, some as far as a few billion light years away. It's quite astonishing to be able to capture photons that have traveled so far.

     

  • NGC 4565 - Needle Galaxy

    This is the final image taken with my RASA, which has now been shipped to a new home at an observatory in Dana Point. In 2025, I installed a new 14" SCT in our observatory, so we'll no longer be restricted to wide-field imaging. We're looking at the edge of a giant spiral galaxy, an interesting perspective that gives us a sense of what our galaxy might look like from the side. This edge-on view makes it impossible for us to see the spiral shape, so from a distance of 50 million light years it appears as a thin sliver in the sky - hence the name "Needle Galaxy". The galactic disc is very slightly warped, likely due to it being pulled and stretched by the gravitational influence of other galaxies in its local group. I think I can detect that warping, although it could just be my imagination. The Needle is likely larger than our own galaxy, with an estimated diameter of about 176,000 light years.

     

  • K2-18

    This is a 3-hour exposure of a star field in the constellation Leo, taken with the f/2.2 RASA telescope. It's a lovely tapestry of stars and galaxies, a view that most probably contains countless worlds brimming with exotic life-forms. Earlier in 2025, astronomers announced that a planet orbiting the red dwarf K2-18 may harbor extraterrestrial life. As it's the first habitable-zone planet found to have water along with an atmosphere that shows tentative signs of life, I thought it would be fun to take a picture of it.
    You cannot see the planet itself, only its home star which is visible just below the big star in the center of the image. I've labeled it for you, but you'll need to zoom in to see it. The planet is larger than Earth and is 124 light years distant from us. In fact, the photons of light that entered my telescope and impacted my sensor to create this image - they set out on their journey just as the 1901 World's Fair was opening in New York.

     

  • Cygnus Wall

    My first attempt at f/11 photography with the EdgeHD 14" telescope. Imaging at such a long focal length presented some new challenges, but I was happy with the result. This is a close-up of the Cygnus Wall - an area of star formation within the North American Nebula. The wall consists of ionized hydrogen and sulfur about 2.5 thousand light years away. The bluish teal areas are the result of doubly ionized oxygen.

     

  • Witch's Broom

    For my second test image with the 14" SCT, we're looking at the tail-end of the witch's broom - part of the Veil Nebula within the larger Cygnus Loop. I love the intricate lacework pattern in this image, and what's also remarkable is the prevalence of all those blue strands of ionized oxygen. Throughout most regions of space, oxygen is a lot less prevalent than hydrogen, as it needs to be manufactured by the stars. What we're seeing in regions such as this is essentially a lot of debris from previous generations of stars that are no longer with us.
    In particular, the reason we see so much blue in the Veil Nebula is that we're looking at the remnants from the explosion of a giant star - a supernova. The shock wave from this explosion collides with material in the surrounding space, providing more than enough energy to dislodge the outermost electrons from oxygen atoms, resulting in the lovely blue strands visible here. As supernova remnants go this one is enormous, covering as much of the sky as does the Andromeda galaxy. Part of the reason for the Cygnus Loop's huge apparent size is its close proximity to Earth, at just over two thousand light years.

     
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