The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is a spiral galaxy and is the closest neighbor to our Milky Way galaxy at a distance of about 2-1/2 million light years. It’s 220,000 light years across and contains about 1 trillion stars. It’s actually moving towards the Milky Way at about 70 miles per second and will collide and… Read More »
M13 is a globular cluster, consisting of about 300,000 stars, in the constellation Hercules. It’s about 25,100 light years away and 145 light years in diameter. Globular clusters are large collections of stars that are bound together by their gravity. In 1974 radio signals (the Arecibo Message) were beamed towards M31 in part as a… Read More »
The North America Nebula is a very large emission nebula, resembling North America, in Cygnus near the star Deneb. Here you can see a large section of the nebula. You can also see parts of the Pelican Nebula on the right side. This one was a bit of a last minute challenge. Saturday night’s… Read More »
C27 Crescent Nebula – my best astrophoto yet! The Crescent Nebula is an emission nebula in the constellation Cygnus, about 5000 light-years away from Earth and about 25 light-years wide. It is formed by the fast stellar wind from the Wolf-Rayet star WR 136, right in the center of the nebula, colliding with and energizing… Read More »
One of my favorite Hubble photos is the Pillars of Creation, which shows three large columns of dust and gas which is in the process of creating new stars. These lie in the heart of M16, the Eagle Nebula, which is a fairly bright emission nebula in the constellation Serpens. Last Sunday night the skies were… Read More »
By some lucky coincidence, the skies have been clear for two nights in a row since my new telescope arrived. As it got to dusk I set up my mount, scope and laptop on the deck knowing I’d be able to see Polaris and Bode’s galaxy from there. Seeing as this was my first time… Read More »
On May 9th Mercury made a transit across the Sun, meaning it passed between the Sun and the Earth. This only happens about 13 times a century, with the next transit on November 11th, 2019. Typically this takes several hours and we were fortunate to have clear skies for the first few hours. Mercury is… Read More »
The sky ended up very clear tonight and the temps were still in the mid-30’s so I made my first attempt at taking a widefield photo of the Andromeda galaxy. I set up my homemade barndoor tracker on my deck and tried to align the hinge line with Polaris, but my neighbor’s trees were blocking… Read More »