Ecliptic Voyage

The Pelican Nebula. Taken under Michigan skies throughout September, 2022. The Pelican Nebula is an emission nebula which has features resembling a long-billed waterbird known as the pelican. If the bird's bill doesn't first pop out to you, look for the pelican's neck and the rest should reveal itself. However, beyond the neck, head and bill, I don't see anything more resembling the bird. The next image is rotated and framed to most easily see the pelican (spoiler alert): The Pelican's Profile in the Pelican Nebula So is there really a pelican shaped cloud of light-emitting gas in space? No, not really. When we take a closer look at the structure, we begin to notice that the gradients that once gave the appearance of the opened-bill of a pelican are actually a stream of opaque dust in the foreground. The same is true for what ends up shaping the top of the pelican's head. In contrast, when we look at the back of the pelican's neck (right side in the above ma

Supernova remnant NGC-6692 - The East Veil Nebula. Taken under Michigan skies, July 2022 A Supernova Remnant The East Veil Nebula is one portion of the much larger supernova remnant known as the Veil Nebula . As the name suggests, a supernova remnant are the remains of a star which has undergone runaway nuclear fusion resulting in a massively luminous explosion. The supernova event that created the Veil Nebula happened about 10,000-20,000 years ago. This image was taken using only two different narrowband filters: Hydrogen-alpha (Hα) and Oxygen-3 (Oiii). The red in the image comes from the Hα data while the Oiii is assigned equally to the green and blue color channels. Realistically, Hα is in the deeper end of the red spectrum while Oxygen-3 is more in between green and blue. The image may not be that far off from what the actual color appearance of the nebula looks like. Being able to record the object in different wavelengths makes it much easier observe specific structures the gasse

The Cygnus Wall in Hydrogen-Alpha: Taken under Michigan Skies, July 2022. In the 2nd century CE, Claudius Ptolemaeus (Ptolemy) wrote the Almagest; a mathematical and astronomical treatise on the apparent motions of the stars and the planets. This influential text was leveraged for the next 1,200 years to support the geocentric solar system (earth-centered) until the the early Renaissance when the helio-centric (sun-centereed) model was developed by Nicolaus Copernicus. In the Almagest, Ptolemy had divided the night sky into 48 constellations; Cygnus being one of them. The constellation Cygnus, being Greek for Swan, earned its name because the brighter stars in this area of sky seem to resemble that of a bird in flight. What people in Ptolemy's time could not know, was the massive amount of nebulous activity that exists within this region of sky. From the massive regions of hydrogen that spread far around the star Sadr, to the North America Nebula spread around Deneb and to the left

The Tadpoles Nebula and the Letter Y Cluster: Taken under Michigan skies Jan 2nd, 2022. I have not had a chance to write anything up for this target but I didn't want to forget about it so I am posting the photo without all of the words. Enjoy!

The Heart Nebula: Taken under Michigan skies, December 13th, 2021 Discovered by William Hershel in 1787, IC 1805 was coined the Heart Nebula for having a structure that sort of resembles that of the human heart. The Heart Nebula is an emission nebula which means it's a cloudy structure of ionized gasses that emits its own light. The wavelength (or color) of light that nebulae emit at will tell you exactly what gas the cloud is composed of. The Heart Nebula emits primarily at a specific red wavelength of light: 656.3 nanometers. This wavelength of red tells us that the nebula is composed of ionized Hydrogen gas labeled Hydrogen-Alpha . Ionized hydrogen can emit at four different colors in the visible spectrum: violet, blue, light-blue and red. The hydrogen atom will release a photon at one of these wavelengths when its electron drops orbits. The photon's wavelength depends

Triangulum Galaxy (Messier 33): Taken under Michigan skies November, 2021. If you haven't already, read this post first:  A Tale of Many Islands . To recap, I mentioned the historic milestone where Edwin Hubble produced evidence confirming the existence of other galaxies by measuring the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31). With this new method in measuring distances and with the old single-galaxy worldview no longer holding us back, we embarked on a journey to grasp the true nature and structure of the universe. Massive achievements in astronomical data collection, radio telescopes and earth-orbiting telescopes paved the way for scientists to begin modeling our universe. Leveraging statistical grouping methods, galaxies are clustered together based on their observed locations and velocities. The Milky Way belongs to what we refer to as the Local Group . This is

  The Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31) with other galaxies M32 and M110 The Andromeda Galaxy is a fantastic marvel in the night sky right now. It is physically 50% larger than our own galaxy and contains an estimated 300 billion stars. By pairing its large size with a relatively short distance to our galaxy (2.5 million light years), its full appearance in the sky spans that of 6 full moons. However, the portion that is visible to the human eye will appear smaller since only the galactic core is bright enough for us to distinguish. The estimated trajectory of M31 suggests an eventual collision with our Milky Way Galaxy in about four billion years. The Universe as a Solitary Island The earliest recorded observations of the Andromeda Galaxy were written in the year 964 CE by the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi in the Book of Fixed Stars . In this book the

The Veil Nebula: Taken under Michigan skies August 5th, 2021 A view spanning six full-moons across the sky, the Veil Nebula is one of the many beautiful nebulous structures located in the constellation Cygnus (The Swan). Around 10,000 years ago, a dying star, roughly twenty times as massive as the Sun, exploded in its final phase of life: supernova. The wispy reds and blues are leftover remnants of the supernova explosion. The left portion and right portion of this supernova remnant are known as the Eastern Veil and Western Veil. Somewhere between these two structures is the neutron star remains from the supernova explosion, but it is probably way to small to resolve in my image. I made posts on the Eastern/Western veil nebula back in 2020. Since they were separate images, and did not include the space in between, they don't capture how massive the entire structure really is. Eve

Saturn: Taken under Michigan skies August 2nd, 2021 Saturn hit opposition on August 2nd, 2021. Opposition is the instance where an outer planet aligns along a line with both the Earth and the Sun. This also means it is at its closest distance to Earth, making it appear its brightest as well as its largest when observed from Earth. Top all that off with a perfectly clear sky forecast! On numerous occasions the clear sky forecasts will be at odds with the national whether cloud forecast. Some occasions, the clear sky forecast will be right while other occasions the national whether cloud forecast is right; so there is always a chance that clouds ruin your parade. Last night (Aug. 2nd) the cloud forecast predicted correctly and the clouds ended up blocking my view of the planets for about 90% of the night. I decided to wait it out since I was all setup but the clouds persisted. However, I did manage

The Pelican Nebula: Taken under Michigan skies in July, 2021. With six hours of data on the Pelican Nebula I figured I would have enough to pull out a vibrant and sharp-featured photo to show. However, it turns out since we have wildfire smoke dumping over Michigan skies this past month, pollutants are scattering the faint light of deep sky targets while amplifying light pollution. The nebulous region where the Pelican nebula resides in is a large swath of sky full of Hydrogen gasses (H-II) which emit in a narrow band of red wavelength light. It turns out the particles making up this smoke pollution end up scattering the red wavelengths much worse than others. Hopefully you can still make out the pelican shape in this object.