Tag: astro photo

Messier 51 from Hubble

The graceful, winding arms of the majestic whirlpool galaxy appear like a grand spiral staircase sweeping through space. They are actually long lanes of stars and gas laced with dust. This sharpest-ever image of the Whirlpool Galaxy illustrates a spiral galaxy’s grand design, from its curving spiral arms, where young stars reside, to its yellowish central core, a home of older stars. The bright pink regions display large bursts of H-alpha, where new stars are formed. I would highly recommend viewing this image on gigapan, where you […]

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NGC 1999 from Hubble

NGC 1999 is a dust-filled nebula with a vast hole of empty space in the center. It is a reflection nebula illuminated by the light of the variable star V380 Orionis. It was previously believed that the black patch was a dense cloud of dust and gas which blocked light that would normally pass through. However, when Herschel observed the space, itresulted in continued black space. This led to the belief that either the cloud material was immensely dense or that an unexplained phenomenon had been detected. […]

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The Grand Pleiades star cluster

Edit 10/25/2021: This image was featured by AAPOD 2! You can check it out here: https://www.aapod2.com/blog/grand%20pleiades Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the bright stars of the Pleiades can be seen without binoculars from even the depths of a light-polluted city. With a long exposure from a dark location, though, the dust cloud surrounding the Pleiades star cluster becomes very evident. Two techniques were used to get this image: framing selection and downsampling. I chose only about 65% of the frames that I actually […]

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NGC 3314 from Hubble

Update 11/17/2021: This image was featured by NASA’s APOD! You can check out their version here: https://theastroenthusiast.com/ngc-3314-from-hubble/ This object is not one but two – two galaxies seeming to overlap by mere chance. The spiral galaxy in front is viewed nearly face-on, its pinwheel shape defined by young, blue, bright star clusters. Against the glow of the background galaxy, dark swirling lanes of interstellar dust appear to dominate the face-on spiral structure. The dust lanes are surprisingly pervasive, and this remarkable pair of overlapping galaxies is one […]

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The ghostly shell of Andromeda

This image, I think, is one of the best images I have produced. It’s absolutely incredible to me the vastness of this object — it would take light 200,000 years to cross this galaxy. 26 hours of pure data from a bortle 1 site were used to create the incredibly deep astrograph. The faint shell around the bright galaxy was most likely created by past gravitational interactions with other galaxies. Image: Equipment: Nikon D90 Sigma 300mm prime lens Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Star Adventurer Tripod Bahnitov Mask Intervalometer […]

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The Antennae Galaxies from Hubble

The galaxies in this image — also known as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039 — are locked in a deadly embrace. Once normal, sedate spiral galaxies like the Milky Way, the pair have spent the past few hundred million years sparring with one another. This clash is so violent that stars have been ripped from their host galaxies to form a streaming arc between the two. In wide-field images of the pair the reason for their name becomes clear — far-flung stars and streamers of gas stretch out into […]

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M83 from Hubble

This is definitely the largest and most beautiful image I have processed to date. Hubble took a stunning 6 panel mosiac in 5 different color bands to create this awesome astrograph. I highly recommend checking out the full mosiac hosted on gigapan: http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/227085. The Hubble photograph captures thousands of star clusters, hundreds of thousands of individual stars, and “ghosts” of dead stars called supernova remnants. The galactic panorama unveils a tapestry of the drama of stellar birth and death spread across 50,000 light-years. The newest generations of […]

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NGC 3603 from Hubble

Like a 4th of July fireworks display, a young, glittering collection of stars looks like an aerial burst. The cluster is surrounded by clouds of interstellar gas and dust—the raw material for new star formation. The nebula, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina, contains a central cluster of huge, hot stars, called NGC 3603. This environment is not as peaceful as it looks. Ultraviolet radiation and violent stellar winds have blown out an enormous cavity in the gas and dust enveloping the cluster, providing an […]

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A Sagittarius triplet – M8, M20, and NGC 6559

Edit 9/10/2021: This image was selected for Italy’s APOD GRAG: https://apod.grag.org/2021/09/10/a-sagittarius-triplet-m8-m20-and-ngc-6559/ This so far is my favorite image! Nearly 21 hours of data (taken across 4! nights) and 3 hours of processing went into this huge project. I love the color range so much – golden milky way stars, pink lagoon nebula, and light blue trifid reflection. Image: Equipment: Nikon D90 Sigma 300mm prime lens Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Star Adventurer Tripod Bahintov Mask Intervalometer DIY diffraction spikes using a violin strings Stellarium All Sky Plate Solver Sharpcap […]

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A two-panel mosaic of the Sadr Region

Image: Equipment: Nikon D90 Sigma 300mm prime lens Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Star Adventurer Tripod Bahintov Mask Intervalometer DIY diffraction spikes Stellarium All Sky Plate Solver Sharpcap Laptop Acquisition: Bortle 2-4 Iso 800 F4 8/04/2021 – North Panel 122 x 2′ light frames 100 bias 34 dark 43 usable flats 0/06/2021 – South Panel 106 x 2′ light frames no bias 29 dark 50 flats Processing: Calibrate with WBPP Blink to discard bad frames Generate normalization data with NormalizeScaleGradient Image integrate CFA drizzle scale 1 Crop DBE each […]

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