Ecliptic Voyage

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.

The Crescent Nebula (NGC 6888): Photo taken under Michigan skies on July 7th, 2021 At about 5,000 light-years away, the Crescent Nebula ( NGC 6888 ) is an emission nebula located in the constellation Cygnus (Greek for Swan). It was discovered by the German astronomer William Herschel in 1792. This beautiful brain-like marvel is apparently the result of interacting stellar winds from different stages of life of Wolf-Rayet star WR-136. In the star's past life (before becoming a Wolf-Rayet), it had undergone a transition into a Red Super-Giant some hundreds of thousands of years ago. As a Red Super-Giant, it slowly puffed out a layer of gas that settled around the star. This star eventually underwent another transition, turning from a Red Super-Giant to a Wolf-Rayet with 'fierce stellar-winds'. The interaction between the stellar winds and the earlier (and sl...

During the night of May 26th, 2021, I didn't think I was going to be able to get a good angle on the full moon that was out since it wasn't supposed to get high enough to clear the tree line in my backyard. I decided to image a few other things instead. A little later in the night, I went outside to make sure the telescope wasn't going to hit the tripod legs and found that the moon was beaming its light through a hole in the trees, glaring right at the telescope. So I slewed the telescope to point to the moon and managed to take photos for about five minutes before the moon began to creep back behind the trees. The Moon: May 26th, 2021 The Moon peeking through the trees

It is almost that time of the year when the summer nebulae (plural of nebula) are high enough in the night sky for imaging, while some can even be seen visually. In the past month I have been spending most of my time imaging the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101) so I would have enough data to pull out some of the faint details against the background of light pollution. I topped off M101 last night leaving me with twelve hours of exposure data. At the end of the night I decided to take some samples of different nebulae rising in the eastern sky just to share. Each image is only a single five minute exposure and I did some very basic histogram stretching to make some of the gaseous structures noticeable. There are a ton of excellent and colorful nebulous targets in the summer. Night time on Earth is beginning to face inward toward the Milky Way more and there is a lot to see. I have a great eastern view of many of these objects and there are even more that rise in the South (that unfortunately tree...

Gifted with a 'surprise' clear sky last night, I decided to set the scope up for some shots of Messier 101: The Pinwheel Galaxy. I was going over the images taken and was surprised to see in one of the five-minute images had been ruined not by one passing satellite but by two. They make a neat crisscross in the image, almost as if nearly missing collision while speeding through their earthly orbits. I opened my planetarium software Stellarium to see if I could identify the two photo-bombers and thought I’d share a little bit of what I found out. In a 300-second exposure, a lot can happen to muck up your data. From poor star tracking, passing clouds, satellites, airplanes and even meteors: If these near-earth occurrences were not your primary target, they end up leaving nasty marks on your image as they skirt by uninvited. Since faint deep sky objects require a lot of images to make out faint detail, most of these marks are outliers in the ov...

Messier 51: Whirlpool Galaxy M51a (left) and M51b (right) At 31 million light-years away, Messier 51 is actually two interacting galaxies. In this photo, M51a (the Whirlpool) is the larger spiral galaxy. The smaller companion, M51b, is classified as a dwarf galaxy and is seen at the end of one of the spiral arms of M51a. Before Copernicus and Galileo, people believed that Earth was the center of existence. The sun, the stars and planets revolved around us. After all, that is exactly how it appeared to be (with the exception of a few 'wanderer' planets and occasional passing of comets). With the advent of advanced mathematics and the birth of the telescope, humans made discoveries that led to many realizations; that Earth is not the center of our solar system. The Sun is not the center of our galaxy. Before we were aware of galaxies other than our own, the...

The Great Orion Nebula (Messier 42)   Located below Orion's belt in the constellation of Orion, the Great Orion Nebula is the brightest nebula visible in the night sky.  Even under light polluted skies, M42 can be seen with only a modest set of Binoculars (try it out if you haven't yet). The Orion constellation: 1/11/2021 at 10:45PM EST from SE MI The Constellation of Orion can be found during the winter months by looking south. As of today, January 11th, it will be visible in the south-east after sunset, reach its highest directly south at 11pm, and begin to set in the West just past 2:30am (for those of you in or near Michigan). I usually look for the 3 stars in a line that make up Orion's belt along with the two much brighter stars Betelgeuse (above the belt) and Rigel (below the belt). ...

Type: Open star cluster Age: ~100 million years Distance: 444 ly Also Known As: The Seven Sisters Michigan has been very cloudy over the past few months and I haven’t had many opportunities to be out imaging. I was however able to record some data on the Pleiades star cluster. I did not capture as much time on this target as I normally would like but I think it turned out good considering the constant parade of clouds lately. M45 is one of the closest star clusters to Earth and is easy to spot in the night sky. To me, this is easy to spot even from my light polluted back yard as it looks like a smudge in the sky. Pointing binoculars or a scope at it reveals the blueish stars that form the Pleiades. There is some blueish cloudiness to this cluster (reflection nebula) that was initially thought to be dust left over from the formation of the stars, but it is now believed to be an unrelated dust cloud in the interstellar medium; dust in between the star cluster and Earth that is sc...