Look Up for Love

The Universe is full of beautiful, sometimes mystifying, and always awe inspiring objects. Stars, planets, comets, galaxies - these are all objects we know and love, objects we can see with our naked eye in the night sky, and objects that are the source and subject of stories going back thousands of years.

But there is another type of object, often impossible to see with the naked eye, that didn't enter human consciousness until around 1,000 years ago - the nebula. Nebulae are clouds of dust and gas that occupy the space between stars. Called star nurseries, nebulae are the place where new stars are born. And these objects are arguably some of the most beautiful in the night sky.

During this month of February, when Saint Valentine is encouraging everyone to become obsessed with heart shaped candies, chocolates, and cards, I have instead been looking up and imaging the giant heart shape in the night sky - the Heart Nebula. About 7,500 light years from Earth, this nebula is made up primarily of oxygen and sulfur gases, which show up as brilliant blue and orange when imaged through a narrow band filter.

All Heart Nebula products are 10% off with code HEART, now through February 14th. I hope you enjoy this glimpse of the night sky and the opportunity to give a different kind of heart shaped Valentine this year <3

Summer Monsoons -vs- New Astronomy Camera

One exposure of the Elephant’s Truck Nebula.

New astro camera.

It is said that if you obtain a new piece of astronomical gear you will tempt the weather to be cloudy and not be able to use said new astronomical gear.

This is of course what happened.

I have converted over to a dedicated astronomical camera (ASI2600MM) to be able to image in more radiation bands than just visible light. This setup allows me to image objects not only in red, green, and blue (visible color), but also in the Hydrogen Alpha, Oxygen III, and Sulfur II plasma bands. These new bands have the bonus of being able to photograph through light pollution. When you combine these three, you can display your astronomical objects in false color (this is the way we “see” color images from the Hubble Space Telescope).

Thankfully, the summer monsoons have been strong this summer. It has been cloudy every night for all most three months, but it is bringing some much-needed precipitation to the area. It also has not allowed me to photograph all summer. You can see one 10-minute exposure in Hydrogen Alpha in the picture above from my first project through the new camera - the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula.

The Seven Sisters

The Seven Sisters. What’s the secret to astrophotography? Time.

The bottom image is just one 4-minute exposure and the top image is a combination of over 20 hours of exposure time. The final image was photographed over seven nights in the winter of 2021. These objects are so far away from Earth (444 light-years and the closest of the Messier objects) that it takes a lot of time and a camera to bring out the details.

The Pleiades is an open star cluster, ”middle aged” stars surrounded by a dust cloud in the interstellar medium through which the stars are currently passing.

Prominent in the winter sky (and seen before dawn in the summer). Galileo Galilei was the first astronomer to view the Pleiades through a telescope.