Monthly Archives: March 2019

Drop Dead Gorgeous

 in Blog  tagged Carina / Eta Carina Nebula / Flamsteed-Bayer / Hubble / RGB

I hope it doesn’t sound too boastful for me to say it, and to some degree it is a matter of personal taste, but I think this is just gorgeous, and the best astrophoto I’ve produced to date.  It is, of course, from the remote observatory in Australia, and is not visible from up here in the north.  Eta Carina is quite bright, and large – about 4 times the size of the Orion Nebula.  It’s a mixture of emission, reflection, and dark nebulosity, as the best ones often seem to be. For this type of target I would typically […]

The Vela Supernova Remnant

 in Blog  tagged narrowband / Vela Nebula / Vela SNR

A couple of months ago I posted just the H-alpha channel of this image from the remote observatory in Australia.  The addition of O-III and S-II data makes a dramatic difference – well worth the wait! This is actually just a small portion of the Vela SNR, one of the largest and brightest SNRs in our night sky, just 1.5 degrees wide out of the full width of 8 degrees.  The supernova that produced this magnificent nebula happened about 11,000 to 12,000 years ago and was just 800 light-years from Earth in the constellation Vela. The total exposure time for […]

M78 From the Other Side

 in Blog  tagged Barnard's Loop / dark nebula / M78 / Messier 78 / orion / reflection nebula

As mentioned earlier, I have been waiting (not so patiently) for better weather in Australia to finish collecting image data from M78, a bright reflection nebula in Orion.  It has finally happened, although there were issues with the quality of some frames.  I haven’t yet been able to figure out what caused the problem, but did find a reasonable work-around for it. This was captured from the other side of Earth, but also makes me curious about what M78 would look like from its other side.  In the upper right it appears that there is more bright blue light behind […]

Canyon & Dipper, Part 2

 in Blog  tagged big dipper / california nebula / Canyon / pleiades

In an earlier post I shared a picture taken at the top of a canyon wall, showing the canyon below and the the Big Dipper above (through some interesting clouds).  When I went down into the canyon (not actually the same one) I thought I’d try the same thing from this different perspective.  It would have been great to shoot this looking up the canyon wall, just as the previous shot was looking down such a wall, but since the Big Dipper was pretty low in the northern sky, that was not going to work.  Indeed, I had to walk […]