I captured the Cocoon Nebula to reveal its rich star-forming structure, intricate dark dust lanes, and vibrant emission clouds, while sharing the story and techniques behind creating the image.

The Iris Nebula is a reflection nebula located in the Constellation of Cepheus. A reflection nebula is a cloud of gas and dust that is illuminated or excited by a nearby stars. It was first discove…

Shown above is my second attempt at imaging M13, the Great Hercules Cluster. I decided to revisit it because both my skills and equipment have improved significantly since my first attempt, and I k…

This year I’ve really leaned into “galaxy season,” and in the process I’ve rethought my entire approach to processing OSC galaxy data. I found myself moving away from some of the more elaborate wor…

Note: I chose this photo to write up for my astronomy club’s astronomy journal, so the write up is a little longer than my typical. March through May is often referred to as ‘galaxy season’ a…

M3 is the first object in the Messier list to have been discovered by Charles Messier himself on 3 May 1764.  Messier mistook it for a starless nebula, and it was William Herschel who correctly ide…

NGC 5907 is another yet another galaxy discovered by William Herschel, on May 5, 1788, although it seems he may not have seen the entire galaxy. In 1850 George Stoney definitely identified the othe…

HGC 61 was first discovered by William Herchel in April of 1785. In 1981, Paul Hickson added it to his list of compact galaxy groups, and it became known as HCG 61. Hickson’s criteria was at least …

NGC 4725 is another galaxy discovered by William Herschel, in 1785. It is an intermediate barred spiral galaxy approximately 40 million light years from earth. Interestingly it appears to have only…

The Sunflower Galaxy, M63, was the first object discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1779, and subsequently added to Charles Messier’s catalogue. This was later the first object where spiral arms were i…

NGC 3718/3729 NGC 3718 is an unusually shaped galaxy located approximately 48 million light years from earth, appearing in the constellation Ursa Major. The galaxy has an S-shape and a dust band cr…

From Wikipedia: is a spiral galaxy in the mid-northern constellation Canes Venatici. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1781, and catalogued by Charles Messier. The galaxy has two ring structur…

From Wikipedia: NGC 2085 is an intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major. This was fun and interesting target to photograph. The galaxy is deformed, and has a very unique shape due…

Since the weather has been generally poor, with only small windows of clear sky, I've been experimenting with Lunar and Planetary photography. The skill set and capture techniques are quite different, however the equipment I already own, particularly the 8 inch SCT is a reasonable setup for beginners. The capture technique emphasizes quick and quality image capture and extensive post processing with completely different software tools.

On November 28th I got an opportunity to shoot Comet 3I/ATLAS. This comet is pretty faint, so many of the typical techniques for generating a single comet image didn't work very well. The above image shows the comet trail against a static background of stars. I also animated the motion. Here is a zoom in the comet: I also noticed in the lower left corner of the full image that there was an asteroid visible. That is a main belt asteriod known as 109 Felicitas.

I'm still way behind in processing and writing up so many of the deep space photos I've taken, but since it's a full moon, I decided this month to give that a try. I took two minutes of video with SharpCap, stacked it in AutoStakkert! using this workflow. I'm pretty pleased with the results for my first try.

It's been a while since I imaged this in early August. I'm really happy with how this turned out given all the struggles I had. I managed to get lucky with the weather, and get a smoke free night. Then I had a few self-induced struggles. I forgot to put the IR/Cut filter back in the imaging train which caused the stars to blow up and aggravated an issue with stars spikes that I've been struggling with.

Creepy, or beautiful? Why not both?