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June 29th, 2021:

          So today I'm posting a medley. The first three of these are reruns, with the Wizard Nebula in much better detail than last year's image, the Iris Nebula from the same night in roughly the same level of detail as a month or so ago (this night was mainly used to calibrate some parts of my workflow), and the Pelican Nebula from last night, in a different framing from my shot earlier this month in Potter County, and with a lower contrast and Signal:Noise ratio as a matter of course due to the light pollution here. Given that it's right around a full moon, none of these are the best they could be, but they're worth a gander.

          The last shot is a new object for the gallery, NGC 6914, and so gets a little write-up. It was an integration of a little over an hour, and still I was surprised by the level of detail: it shared the sky with a bright full moon along with the suburban light pollution, and is in a dimmer and more obscure reach of the Gamma-Cygni complex. It's obscure enough that it sadly has no catchy moniker, and unlike many of the brighter Messier and NGC objects I've imaged; it wasn't discovered until well after Herschel, Messier, and the like.

          It was discovered by Édouard Jean-Marie Stephan in 1881—whom you may remember from my shot of Stephan's Quintet over the Winter—and since I've been making a habit of comparing French astronomers to Mario characters, we can say that this man was Toad. I will not elaborate on that because I never owned a Nintendo console and am just going with my gut. While he did a great deal of object discovery, he also did some of the earliest pioneering work to use interferometry in astronomy. That's a big deal.

         To summarize: by splitting a beam of light, radio, or other coherent EM waves and recombining them, a delay in one of the paths (due to movement, a change in distance traveled, or a change in the refractive index of the medium) will create an altered waveform when the beam is recombined and measured. Such a device can measure a great many things, and when the coherent light is gathered from a star by multiple telescopes and focused together, the difference in distance traveled as the earth rotates can equal one half of a light wave: the peaks of one telescope's light waves land in the trough of the other's and the star seems to disappear. The star is hidden in an "interference fringe", which is larger the closer the scopes are to each other. If the angular size of the star is large enough, it won't fit inside of this fringe, allowing the apparent size of a star to be measured... Stephan was the first to try this, and while he only got within the rough ballpark, he invented a technique that has become essential to astronomy today.

         ANYWAY, NGC 6914 is rather large enough that we don't need interferometry to measure its angular size. It's about 3x3 arcminutes across in the sky (the moon by comparison is about 30-34 arcminutes in diameter). In person, it's about 100 lightyears across, and is about 6000 lightyears away in the constellation Cygnus, the swan. A real lovely thing about this nebula is that it does a great job of showcasing the three main types of nebulosity in one object. It's foregrounded against the luminous pinks and magentas that—I hope some of you have come to recognize—comes from ionized hydrogen (in particular, as the protons and electrons recombine). This is emission nebulosity. In front of this we have a roiling bank of dark nebulosity, clouds of interstellar dust that blot out the light, and for which structure is quite a bit more apparent thanks to the bright stars set like crown jewels in this dusky diadem; the light we can see shining on these clouds makes up the third category: reflection nebulosity.

         This complex is also an excellent example of what some of the most massive star-forming regions in our galaxy look like (though this has tapered off somewhat, and most of the massive stars are estimated to be about 5 million years old), dominated by the Cygnus OB2 association of stars. The bright stars you can see are only a few of the 50+ O-type stars residing in this complex. These are stars burning from 30,000 to 52,000 K, making our sun look like a cool ember at only 5,772 K. The dimmest of these are main-sequence stars that are a mere 10,000 times as bright as the sun, while the brightest are supergiants that are several million times as bright. They are at least 16 times as massive, but can be found at well over a few hundred times the mass, and are among the largest stars known. There are also hundreds of B-type stars, another type of superluminous blue star that can range from 2-20 times the sun's mass and can be over 100,000 times as bright.

         That seems a bit excessive if you ask me.

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June 18th, 2021:

          The funny thing about this shot, at least insofar as it's a mark of progress for me, is that I had to dig it out of my recycling bin to process and post. I've scaled this shot so it's not immediately apparent, but there's a lot of abberation in the stars. They're bloated and ring-like up close. I'm still not entirely sure if this was due to fogging of the secondary mirror, a pinched mirror cell, or inaccurate/slipped collimation. When I got in this morning and processed the data, I was awfully put out to realize this and just pressed 'delete' on the whole thing. At that point it was around 4:00 AM, and I had been outside since nautical twilight. It was only after stepping back for some perspective (and coffee), giving the data a best effort—and especially comparing it to my shot of the same nebula from August of last year—that I decided I may as well keep this one after all. It's heartening to see not only improvement, but even that said improvement is already below my standards lol. It's a flawed shot of the Crescent Nebula/NGC 6888, but it unmistakably IS a shot of the Crescent Nebula, with a good helping of detail and accurate color to boot.

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June 16th, 2021: Pt. 2

          The better of my two shots, this is 42 minutes of light from a structure of "The North America Nebula" (NGC 7000, Sharpless 117, Caldwell 20) called "The Cygnus Wall". It's interesting to note that this shot is intensely interrelated with my shot of The Pelican Nebula; in fact it is a part of the same region of ionized hydrogen emission, lying on the other side of the foregrounded section of dark molecular cloud ringing the nebula complex.

          Like so many prominent nebulae and galaxies, it was first noticed by the funky fresh William Herschel himself, on October 24th, 1786. Some decades later, it was catalogued by his son John Herschel in 1829, and designated NGC 7000 in Dreyer's 1888 New General Catalogue. It bore this name—more fitting for a food processor or a leafblower—for only two years before Germany's pre-eminent pioneer of astrophotography Max Wolf noticed the resemblance to North America. The likeness is actually not terrible, though without a wide angle it's not immediately apparent in this shot. To help orient the reader: the ionized, reddish 'Cygnus Wall' would be the Pacific Coast of Mexico, and that dark nebula is the gulf. You wouldn't be the only one orienting by it, either: the geography comparison is now commonly used to indicate parts of the nebula. For example, the star that creates all of the ionizing radiation (truly a binary system, the same that illuminates 'the Pelican') is nicknamed "The Bajamar Star", as it's nested in the dark nebula right around where the Bahamas would be (which gained their name from the Spanish term for low tide, when the rather flat islands were most visible at sea).

          While this nebula has been known about for centuries, it took a tremendous amount of that time to figure out precisely where it is. While we have quite a few tools in our rangefinding toolbox, none of them were a terrific fit, because there is no inherent index for HII (hydrogen emission nebula) regions. If they're close enough, we can use parallax to measure the distance of objects by judging the change in perspective against very distant 'fixed' stars as we move in our great circle around the sun. From earth, we can only do this within about 325 lightyears, but with space telescopes, this can potentially improve a great deal. By 1989, the Hipparcos satellite could measure out to about 1600 lightyears. This nebula was further.

         If it contained certain kinds of stars, like Cepheid variable stars whose oscillating brightness indicates a specific mass, and thus absolute magnitude: we could see how far away those stars were by how dim they were from earth. NGC 7000 contained none. Recognizing other stellar types helped, but only for a rough ballpark. If it were extremely far (ignoring the impossible size required) we could judge by what kind of stars could even be distinguished, or if an SN1a supernova happened we would know that the absolute magnitude at peak was -19.3, or else if it was further still (10s of millions to billions of lightyears) we could measure the redshift due to space itself expanding. No, it wasn't that far.

         So, it became a pretty hotly contested matter, with the consensus only narrowing it down to between 1500 and about 3000 lightyears away. It remained that way until last year. While Hipparcos could measure distance by parallax up to 1600 lightyears in 1989, it has since become possible to measure out to 3000, or even 10,000 by using the Hubble Space Telescope. Since this is a very time-consuming process requiring multiple measurements over time, and because Hubble sees a great deal of use for many projects, a space telescope called Gaia was sent up with a suite specifically designed for astrometric measurement. As a result, we now know that NGC 7000 lies on the upper end of the estimated distances, at 2590 ± ~80 lightyears. This is doubly impressive given that it covers an area of sky that John Herschel described as "most extremely large", over 10x the angular size of the full moon. That places its true dimensions at about 140 x 90 lightyears across (and a presumably commensurate depth). Despite this, it can't be seen with the naked eye even in dark skies, owing to to the distances involved.

         The nebula is home to some intensely interesting phenomena. Not only is it a stellar nursery, but it contains some of the highest star-forming efficiency we've ever seen: with clouds (the part of the nebula that is still dark, a particularly vibrant region is in NGC 7000's 'Gulf of Mexico') able to fuse 36%-62% of their matter into stars. Elsewhere in the galaxy this percentage tends towards single digits. Despite no complete explanation, we do have an index for this, called T Tauri stars, i.e. TTS (named like many oddball star types with the Bayer designation of the first known example star). Like Cepheids, they're also "variable" in that their brightness changes, but unlike such regular oscillations, it's the flickering of a young star as it sucks in new fuel from its infalling accretion disk; like the sputtering and belching of a campfire catching on dry timber, still just one-half to three times the size of our sun. Because this is distinctive, but not uniform, it tells us age instead of distance: we know these stars are no more than 10 million years old. We can also accurately judge the density of molecular hydrogen clouds. So, by comparing the number of TTS and the density of the clouds, we can see how many stars such a cloud has formed in the last 10 million years. The best explanation for the efficiency is the shock of colliding with the nuclear furnace of an HII region. We may do our best to separate them in our lives, but once again the cosmos shows its fondness for exquisitely interrelating creation and destruction.

         Some of the TTS in the North America Nebula have been seen to experience massive influxes of matter from their disks, and become something else entirely for a time: what we know as FU Orionis (or FUor) stars. As they get more fuel, they make more heat, as they make more heat, they expand to radiate it, as they expand, they widen the infall horizon for their accretion disks and collect more fuel. In these feedback loops, they may brighten by up to 6 magnitudes as they gorge themselves on about 0.0001 solar masses per year. This sounds unimpressive in such terms, so to rephrase: they become up to 250 times as bright while swallowing up to 33 times the Earth's weight in matter every year. They do this for decades at a time, and the average star will erupt perhaps 10 to 20 times in this way before they stabilize as main sequence stars. Our sun almost certainly did.

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June 16th, 2021: Pt. 1

          This capture was unfortunately a short one. The object moves low across the southern sky and I had a brief window as it passed between a tree and the power lines on my street, with wind gusts at the start and clouds at the end. Still, it's an instantly recognizeable sight, not just from my shot last year (which you've all no doubt committed to memory, for all time), but from one of the Hubble Space Telescope's most famous images: "The Pillars of Creation".

          The Pillars are clearly only a piece of this larger emission nebula, which is often called "the Eagle Nebula", and regrettably less often called cooler names like "The Star Queen Nebula" and "The Spire" (both referring to the larger dark nebula silhouette opposite the Pillars). More formally, it's been recorded in many catalogs: Gum 83, Collinder 375, RCW 165, Sharpless 49, NGC 6611, but it was first published in the Catalogue of Charles Messier as M16. Yet... he wasn't the first to discover it.

          Enter the sad tale of Jean-Phillipe Loys de Cheseaux. If Messier and Méchain are the Mario and Luigi of French astronomers, Cheseaux is Yoshi: a cruelly trod upon and sidelined character for all of his MVP work. He wasn't even French: he was Swiss, but he submitted his work to the French Academy of Sciences. This was perhaps his first mistake. In 1746, he had submitted his own catalogue of deep sky objects, including eight nebulae he discovered himself—the Eagle among them—when Messier was still a teenager. Yet this catalogue was only first found cited in the 1759 private notes of the French astronomer Le Gentil (you may not picture him in a game, Le Gentil was *actually* the most ill-fated astronomer of all time, he would be a mailroom worker at Nintendo HQ crushed in a freak vending-machine accident), and worse still, it wasn't published until 1892 by yet another French astronomer, Guillaume Bigourdan (a commendable act that I think earns him a Waluigi comparison).

         You'll have to excuse the digression from the matter of the Nebula because this wasn't the end of indignities done to Cheseaux. Perhaps most importantly, he was the first to posit Olber's Paradox, in modern terms and with compelling examples. For those who aren't familiar, the idea is a foundational concept in the field of modern cosmology. It points out that if the universe were infinitely old, infinitely wide, and contained stars/galaxies/nebulae/etc. throughout: the space between the stars would not be dark. No matter the extinction of distance or obstruction, something would be there at some distance, to send or bounce or refract photons to you from that piece of sky, and they would have had time to get here. The universe, then, has some bound; whether in time, distribution, or space itself, there is some limiting factor that creates a horizon of nothing.

         You might have noticed that it's not called "Cheseaux's Paradox", because Cheseaux was not Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers: a man who owned a copy of Cheseaux's work, who took notes on said work, and who used the same examples to advance the same concept almost 80 years later. To add to the shadiness, Olbers had taken at least nine pages of notes on Cheseaux's work on comets, yet when writing about comets himself, he never cited Cheseaux once. Oh right, Cheseaux also discovered two comets. One presumes that he gave up astronomy at some point, likely because he got no damn respect. He moved on to studying biblical chronology and then died at the young age of 33. No work I can find even mentions how he died, so perhaps that too was hardly acknowledged. Perhaps he was just insufferable. One hopes so.

         ANYWAY! The nebula itself hasn't gotten much recognition in its lifetime, either. It wasn't until 1995 that Hubble's "Pillars of Creation" shot became one of the most widely looked at, printed, and shared astrophotos ever taken. Honestly, I think Sigmund Freud would have had a field day if he'd lived to see the popularity of this particular nebula. Something about cigars. This stogie of the Serpens constellation hasn't just been a subject for oggling, however; it's also a nearby example (5,700 ± 400 lightyears) of some extremely dynamic star formation.

         Indeed, the Pillars contain numerous coalescing and young stars, yet they're only partly "of Creation". While they appear to be extending serenely out into space, they're much like the columns I discussed in my shot of the Pelican nebula, and are a subtractive kind of sculpture. These columns are being 'boiled' away from molecular hydrogen to atomic hydrogen, ionized by a cluster of massive, young, blue, O-type supergiants. The two larger pillars each contain an estimated mass of about 300 times that of the sun—100 solar masses for the smaller, third pillar— and despite that, the ionizing radiation is enough that it could cook them away in about 20 million years... In this case, it would actually be long enough for some pillar-like vestige to outlast the stars responsible. However they are also being pushed by the stellar 'wind' of charged particles, getting shunted away at some 20 kilometers per second. As this infernal wind batters them, we have already seen the ripples of their undoing: a process called Rayleigh-Taylor instability in fluid dynamics, the same process by which a mushroom cloud first crumples at the sides and the perturbances become eddies that break the surface tension and pull it apart. It's estimated that the Pillars will be scattered to the winds on a timescale of only hundreds of thousands of years.

         Only time will truly tell. While we have an educated guess of their fate, and we have narrowed down the possibilities of just how they came to be this way, it's hard to call it a closed case. The processes involved here are tremendously complex. Beyond the hydrodynamics of these bodies with clashing densities, temperatures, and speeds, we need also to account for the energy put out by the new stars forming within, for the magnetic fields of the stars and clouds alike, and for the gravity exerted by each and every concentration and anisotropy of the enormous masses involved. It may be slower than golf in a blizzard, but we have front-row seats, and the Pillars are one of the best objects we have in which to observe the fluid dynamics of molecular clouds, stellar winds, and star birth. Sometimes a cigar is just a nebula.

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June 6th, 2021: Pt. 2

          Life post-quarantine has been a trying and often overwhelming new normal. I find more and more aspects of it in disrepair that are felt only now as things accelerate back up to speed. I've lost fillings in my teeth, found new allergies in the Spring air (neither of which I can afford to have treated), gotten new anxieties about old things and old anxieties about new things, felt the hidden weight of debt in time ill-spent, and watched interpersonal connections languish and wither in neglect. Life before felt wider.

          The night sky has been one of the few facets of my life that allow me to recapture that here and there. It feels wider because space is literally wide as hell. It also helps to remind me that these convulsions, which feel like the totality of existence from within, are impossibly small parts of a whole. It reminds me that the ghoulish aspects of this world—the hardships, scarcities, and value forms that it strains to impress upon us as intrinsic—don't descend here from across time and space. We project them over the stars in a way that is no less real, but no less artificial than high-pressure sodium/mercury vapor lamps and LEDs. The solution is no less practical yet thoroughgoing than putting lampshades on the lights.

          The same way that light pollution has blinkered our sight of the physical whole (less than 50% of the world population can see the Milky Way), the reasons for light pollution—the worship of productivity around the clock, the scarcity which drives us to light up private property like so many fortresses, the industry of creating and collecting criminals for profit and calling it 'security'—these have become such complete fixtures that we mistakenly see the entire universe as though it proceeded from them, and we don't see ourselves as though we proceeded from it. That feels narrow because it is. I often hear people say that they don't like to think about space because it scares them, because they feel small and insignificant. The problem doesn't lie in space, but in a society where we equate insignificance with failure, and being small with living in fear.

          Seeing the width of the universe itself reminds me that our lives can be wider things in such a context, and that another world is possible.

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June 6th, 2021: Pt. 1

          Look, I've shot this galaxy twice before now. This time though, I shot it reaaal nice, see? Under skies with next to no light pollution. We can just skip to the part where ya just oogle this one for me, capiche?

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June 5th, 2021: Part 3

         The centerpiece of this shot is IC 5067, and is quite evidently only one region of a vast nebular complex about 1800 lightyears away in the constellation Cygnus. This region is part of "The Pelican Nebula" and is visibly divided by the thick and dark molecular cloud occupying much of the upper edge of this shot from the region known as "The North America Nebula". The bright reds you see are the glowing emission of an intensely ionized area of mainly hydrogen gas that is holding for now against a shock-front of ultraviolet radiation and charged particles, boiling and blasting it away into the colder reaches of space.

         We can see in this image distinctive pillars of denser matter holding against this energetic gale, and they are dense enough still to be highly active stellar nurseries, given away by telltale bipolar jets of plasma known as Herbig-Haro objects (though these are very small in the scale of the image with only visibly suggested if you know where to look and what to look for).

         It was only after intense study that the source of all this ionizing radiation was revealed, and by careful process of elimination, it was narrowed down to only one star with the designation 2MASS J205551.25+435224.6. It's a type "O" star, a giant furnace of a thing destined to live fast and die young as it burns hot enough to luminesce in the blue-white spectra. At the same time, even if it were in the frame it is unlikely to be visible as it sits well behind the great dark molecular cloud mentioned earlier. That's because this molecular cloud—though appearing to be a flat border—is actually the foregrounded part of a titanic ring of colder matter, pushed away by this tremendous phenom of a star.

         On their own timescale, objects like this are incredibly dynamic and transient things. In a few million years, if anyone is still observing from earth, they will find nothing resembling North America or a pelican, assuming that those are still entities or concepts. Of course, they will likely have plenty to look at that we can only guess at, like perhaps the supernova remnants of Betelgeuse in Orion.

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June 5th, 2021: Part 2

         This object is a bird of a feather with the inchworm, and both are indeed part of IC 1318: the same massive complex of dark and emission nebulae 3700 lightyears away in the constellation of Cygnus the Swan (of no relation to the Swan Nebula which is multiple constellations away but looks like a swan). They may not be easy to see without advanced techniques, but they're certainly easy to locate, as IC 1318 also occupies the sky surrounding one of its brightest stars, Sadr AKA Gamma Cygni, and is often called "the [Sadr/Gamma Cygni] region". You may suspect at this point that these two emission nebulae are glowing with radiation from the same star, and you'd be right! But before you pop the champagne and add the title "super sleuth" to your resume, get this: the star heating them isn't Sadr.

         Sadr seems just the suspect to close this case. It's 12 times as heavy as the sun and 150 times as wide. It emits over 33,000 times the energy. It would light those hydrogen clouds up like a damn Christmas tree... but instead, it's making you sweat like a boiled Thanksgiving dinner. You've probably already started chainsmoking in your dingy private detective office, because Sadr is only half the distance away that IC 1318 is: 1800 lightyears by parallax measurements with only a 15% margin of error. That crumb Ockham played you like a cheap trumpet. Yeah, anyway, dramatic genre-savvy reveals aside, this nebula complex is quite a lot like the Pelican, in that the source of its ionization is hidden beneath a thick shroud of dust.

         With regard to this specific region: while it doesn't have the wow factor at a glance, there are some fine details in the image that I'm quite happy with. You may notice not only the inclusion of some dark nebulosity obscuring and intruding at the edges, and in a more striking but easily missed example: a small condensed pocket of dark nebulosity in the upper left-hand side of the nebula, known as a Bok globule. The astronomer who discovered them was a Dutch-American astronomer with a truly incredible name: Bart Bok. For most of his career he worked alongside his wife and fellow astronomer Priscilla Fairfield, and they distinguished themselves not only in their discoveries, but in their pioneering work as science communicators to the general public. They really were ride or die for each other too, and were just too cute.

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June 5th, 2021: Part 1

         This dense globule is another object that exists within a far larger context than the one shown, and is one of a few such regions where a dense agglomeration of dust and gas has resisted the stellar wind of a seriously massive nearby triple star system, HD 206267, some 2,000 lightyears distant in the constellation Cepheus. Much like the Pelican nebula, the 'Trunk' shows a clearly defined shock-front where the UV radiation and charged particles—moving at around 3,225 kilometers per second, in this case—are cooking away a pocket of resistance, even blasting away the protoplanetary disks (or 'proplyds') of younger nearby stars outside of the Elephant's sheltering head.

         Yet despite all of this rude stellar blasting, this pocket of resistance is birthing new things even as it crumbles. Not just despite, but even partly because of this external pressure, IC 1396A is home to a few newborn stars no greater than 100,000 years of age. These are hidden within to all but infrared telescopes like Spitzer, but their older siblings, perhaps only a couple million years old, can be seen quite clearly in the head, where they have hollowed out a cavity of their own and lit it with a warm yellowish glow.

         While the stellar winds push from outside, these young stars push from within and have contributed to some pockets of exceptional density where numerous proto-stars have been detected. This dialectic process is a beautiful example of the way that destruction and renewal can be interpenetrating things, and maybe more poetically; the way that the freshness of being can bring about hope even in the face of devastation, if it's protected by a large disembodied elephant head.

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June 4th, 2021

         This is the first of the shots I took while on my brief vacation under the dark skies of PA's Susquehannock State Forest, and is IC 1318 B, more commonly known as "the inchworm". Much like the divide between the Pelican and North America Nebulae, this too is a foregrounded piece of dark dust and gas, pushed in our direction over millions of years by the star that has given this nebula it's delicious strawberry flavor (ionized the molecular hydrogen that glows red and pink).

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June 1st, 2021

         I tend to neglect globular clusters because they're easy to image and to process compared to other deep-sky objects, and because they tend to have the same distinctive look (i.e. globular and clustered). It's easy for me to forget, then, that among them are still true standouts worthy of attention. Messier 13 here is one of them, so much that it is most commonly called "The Great Globular Cluster in Hercules". This moniker is considered by many to be one of the cruellest bait-and-switch pranks in both astronomy and cinema history, because this cluster doesn't even feature in a single frame of the 1997 motion picture: a revelation that both Ebert and Roeper have repeatedly cited as "[their] darkest hour" and "the worst day of [their] life".

         The cluster sits about 22-25,000 lightyears away from Earth, but for all of that distance, it can even be seen as a fuzzy patch with only a pair of binoculars, or even the naked eye under dark skies. This is because it encompasses a few hundred thousand stars within the space of only 85 lightyears. As a point of comparison, the stars are packed over a hundred times more closely than they are in our own neighborhood, closely enough that they sometimes even collide with each other and form new stars termed "blue stragglers".

          While this is exceptional in our own sky, it's actually rather humdrum as far as globular clusters can get universally. Some of the largest can hold tens of millions of stars and span multiple hundreds of lightyears across. They can get so densely packed in their cores that in the Shapley-Sawyer classification system—which ranks the density of globular clusters from greatest to least with the numerals I-XII—M13 only rates an 'intermediate' class V designation. Globular clusters as a class are also exceptionally old objects... yet even with an estimated age of 11.65 billion years—more than twice the age of our Sun, and most of the age of the known universe—M13 has no superlative here, either. Some have been estimated at 12.8 and even 13.5 billion years of age.

          If all of this equivocating about M13's mediocrity in the general scheme of things has curbed your appreciation, I hope you'll reconsider. For all that the observable universe is beyond large, and is practically guaranteed to hold better sights than we can ever access here on Earth: M13 is one that we can access on any clear night, and is the very finest we have... In the northern half of the sky at least because Omega Centauri whips the ass of this globular cluster, which—I can't stress enough—wasn't even actually in the movie "Hercules".

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May 26th, 2021

         I'd like to begin this entry by extending a little apology to anyone who may have been checking this site for updates. As far as I know, that's only one person (love you grandma), but I'll allow the possibility that others—tens of others, even!—may have checked this page since my last update about 3 months ago. This page is one of a few platforms where I share my work, and even then, none of them are for the acclaim (nor for the riches: unfortunately, this is still a hard job with... inverse paychecks.) That said, these excuses are thin gruel; purely given that this site is something I set out to do for myself, I'd like to honor that. So, that's the game plan going forward.

         Of course, for those who know me, you know that my radio silence doesn't mean I've let a single clear night pass me by. Springtime in the Northeastern U.S. is known to many observational astronomy geeks as 'galaxy season', because the expanse passing overhead at night is a window into truly deep space. I've captured quite a few galaxies, and a few nearer deep-sky oddities besides. I won't keep yammering on about them. Truly, I've captured so many that I don't even have enough yammer in me to discuss them all. So, without further ado, let's work backwards.

May 20th, 2021

         Had some strange color calibration issues on this one (which are apparently an infamous challenge with cameras that use the Sony IMX294 sensor) so the stretching used has been pretty modest and there is some sensor bias artifacting at 100% size.

          Even so, this is a magnificent object and was worth imaging at some point during galaxy season. I give you Messier 51, The Whirlpool Galaxy (and it's tidally interacting dwarf galaxy NGC 5159 or Messier 51b), which is not actually being sucked in as it appears, but is passing behind M51; it may have passed directly through some 500-600 million years earlier. M51 is located about 23 million lightyears away in the Canes Vanatici constellation. It is a modest spiral estimated to be about 40-50% the size of the Milky Way in area, and only about 10-11% the size in mass. Nevertheless it features rich marble veins of dust that are the classic home of star formation. In fact, M51 is currently in a period of accelerated star formation that is expected to last for perhaps another 100 million years.

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May 19th, 2021

         This is "The Splinter Galaxy" AKA "The Cat Scratch Galaxy" AKA "The Knife Edge Galaxy" AKA "The [insert something shaped like a line with tapered ends] Galaxy", but more formally it is usually referenced by its designation in the New General Catalogue: NGC 5907 & 5906. That's right, it has two entries all of its own! While this galaxy—like a great many others—was discovered by William Herschel in 1788, it wasn't until 1850 that George Johnstone "the Stone" Stoney discovered a faint, looping stream of stellar matter extending well above and below the plane of this galaxy, which was separately catalogued as entry no. 5906 when John Louis Emil Dreyer assembled the New General Catalogue in 1888.

         While this looping stream was unfortunately too faint for me to capture due to the suburban light pollution, it was one of the first discoveries that made this galaxy such a uniquely piquant object of study. Another was this: unlike many edge-on spiral galaxies, this one is notably somewhat warped in shape. (This at least can be seen in my photo. Note on the left side that it appears bent slightly "up". Less perceptibly, the other side is bent the opposite way.) Even more mysteriously, this galaxy has no nearby neighbors on which to assign the blame. What are the loops? Who went ahead and bent this galaxy?

         For some time, the verdict was quite out on whether the loops were even related to the galaxy and not some supernova remnant, old/cold planetary nebula, or a galactic cirrus serendipitously foregrounded by cosmic coincidence. If Occam had been alive to hear this, he would certainly have stabbed the hypothesizers with his famous knife. As it happens, the loops and the galaxy are now thought to be related. The loops are remarkably well-centered on the galaxy's core along the axis of their obliquity, and when compared to spectrometry data, the foreground hypothesis was found to be quite implausible. Their light is uniform and broad-banded enough to suggest that the loops are indeed made up mostly of stars. It is thought that they were once a roughly spheroid dwarf galaxy, distended over 100s of millions, perhaps billions of years, into a ghostly winding serpent of stars that now wreathes the spiral.

         The galaxy is scarcely a solved puzzle however and presents plenty of other anomalies. For one, it has incredibly few giant stars. The metallicity is extremely low, which is to say that very few generations of stars have lived and died here, exploding and expelling heavier elements in the process. This isn't to say the galaxy itself is young. Nearly all of its constituent stars are dwarves, and such stars live tremendously long lives: many times longer than the suspected age of the universe itself. That's right, most of what you see here is from NGC 5907's founding members! Why though? Why none of the accretion and clumping and star formation of galaxies like ours? The verdict is still somewhat out here; but with the odd perturbations of the loops and the ghost dwarf galaxy, one hypothesis is that the interference was enough to disperse the nursery clouds, to keep the matter from complacently clumping together.

         Of course, there are exceptions to any rule, and in those exceptional places where matter could concentrate, things get no less strange. NGC 5907 is home to what we call an ultraluminous X-ray source (or "ULX"). What are they? A few things can be such a source. Some we can identify, but for a serious fraction including the one in NGC 5907: we don't know. They're objects brighter than any known stellar process, less bright only than the nucleus of their host galaxies, and we don't have one here to study in the Milky Way. Indeed, most galaxies don't. If they emit in every direction, their energy would be something on the order of 100 nonillion—i.e. 10³²— watts. There is no everyday frame of reference to explain something so energetic. Enough to kill a person, or an elephant... or even numerous elephants. For even the most energetic objects, it's an amount that would exceed the Eddington limit: the theoretical maximum for the energy output of stellar objects of a given size.

         That said, there are possible models. For one, maybe it's not omnidirectional. We may simply be in the path of some beamed emission... Though even this model cannot explain the brightest of ULX objects. One model suggests they are black holes of intermediate size that can keep from sinking to the center of their host galaxies (due to a process of gravitational interaction called Chandrasekhar friction, by which angular momentum is bled off of massive objects), but large enough to emit ultraluminous x-ray emissions as they swallow more matter. Quite a number of ULXs can also be ascribed to quasars in the background, and others are found to be supernova remnants with both the energy and the surface area to be seen from Earth as ULX's, but these are readily identified as they fade in a matter of years. Such studies are at the forefront of x-ray astronomy undertaken by orbital observatories like Chandra and XMM-Newton, and something the coming years are likely to reveal much more of.

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May 17th, 2021

         Apparently I had nothing to say about this one or the one before it. I even neglected to label the second. These two were so-so compared to others this galaxy season, but were mainly targets of opportunity on nights when I was more concerned with testing new flat-field calibration and autoguiding techniques. That cavalier attitude is because on June 4th (about a week from now) I've got a little road trip planned to some truly dark skies. The forecast looks bleak but it still has time to change (and if it does, it should yield my best shots yet by far). C'est la vie.

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May 15th, 2021

         By this night, I had already apparently grown a bit burnt out on galaxy season and these spiral beasts. As I was saving this shot, I realized I had already imaged this very same galaxy (M90) a little over a month ago. Overall, I think this one has better color, but less detail, so not a completely pointless exercise I guess. This was another night on which I was mainly experimenting with my process; in this case, for the first time ever: an integration of exposures that were each three minutes long (normally I do 2 minutes). The verdict: At least under skies like this (~Bortle 8), it doesn't bring enough above the noise floor to make it worth the more challenging tolerances for guiding and the resulting unusable exposures.

         The fun fact about this object, which I likely mentioned a month before, is that it's hurtling at us from 60 Mly away, which is unusual, as such a distance is generally when the Hubble flow is the predominant source of apparent movement. Not M90: this galaxy has been yeeted at us like a ninja star.

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May 13th, 2021

         This was my first imaging session after Covid-19 vaccination where I got to enjoy the company/assistance of a friend outside of my quarantine bubble (and fellow space nerd). An unequivocal success with some super good tracking, a roughly new moon, a long integration of 1 hour and 6 minutes, and successfully integrated flat frames shot with an EL panel.

         I give you, the Whale and Hockey Stick galaxies, i.e. NGC 4631 and NGC 4656. This pair (or trio, counting the Whale's attendant dwarf galaxy) are an interacting group of galaxies about 25 million lightyears away on the border of the Coma Berenices and Canes Venatici constellations. The deformation of the hockey stick is thought to be caused be the interference of the whale, but the 'knot' in the hockey stick is also thought by some to be a merging galaxy of its own. No long write up for this duo, it's just a shot that turned out really well.

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May 8th, 2021

         Kind of a dizzy feeling, like the first time you look into two opposing mirrors as a kid and conceptualize a space approaching infinity. You might already be thinking "geez they're really phoning it in today, taking a picture of an open star cluster and feeding us some pablum about infinity." Well, if you thought that, go suck an egg, but also, chew this one over: Every single label in this image is from the NGC, IC, and PGC catalogs, which is to say that this is not an open star cluster. The majority of the objects in this image aren't single stars, but distant galaxies each containing hundreds of billions of stars... and all of this in patch of sky that is vacant to the naked eye in most light pollution regimes.

         Go ahead and peep the full resolution shot, scroll around. You'll be able to make out little spirals, oblate globs, and the like. This stunning tapestry of island universes lies in the Coma Berenices constellation, and is a cluster containing thousands of galaxies some 20 million lightyears across, about 320 million lightyears away. This is light from when our ancestors were just strange lizard-like tetrapods, hiding from gigantic dragonflies amidst the ferns and cycads of Carboniferous era Pangea.

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May 5th, 2021

         While a part of the calibration process didn't work as expected, and robbed this image of much in the way of color (or accurate, usable color) the rest of the session went super smoothly and with 52 minutes of data I was able to capture quite a lot of detail in NGC 7023, The Iris Nebula (or technically LBN 487, as the NGC entry refers to the open cluster directly abutting it).

          At about 6 ly across, and about 1,300 ly distant, it's a pretty stunning little jewel of a reflection nebula set within the densely bejeweled starfields of Cepheus, a constellation with a King's ransom of deep-sky plunder. The central star and the reflection it creates are both ordinarily quite blue, as SAO 19158 (the embedded star) is a massive blue star fresh out of the oven, already quite busy blasting apart its natal molecular cloud. If you were to go there, it would probably smell like lighter fluid, as it's suspected of containing quite a lot of the same compounds; the 'polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons' like benzene, napthalene, and others.

         Unlike the lost bluish tint, the reddish hues you can see on the periphery are accurate. The star is so hot that many of the dust grains in the cloud are heated enough by ultraviolet light to luminesce subtly but visibly. While it may look like a heavenly little oasis: in reality it's just a smelly, hot dump and would be equal parts upsetting and fatal to visit. Isn't the universe grand?.

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April 22nd, 2021

         Another victim of the fraught process of flat-frames and color calibration with the IMX294 sensor (you might notice the purple star, and they dont make them in that color), but one of my favorites in terms of detail (you might note that it has pride of place on the site banner now). My fun fact about this object is that it looks like a damn painting... Incredible feeling, like body-checking the nerd universe into some lockers on the way to the cafeteria and seeing an illustration of its original fantasy barbarian character fall out of its Power Rangers lunchbox. I don't even need a taunt, just a hideous chortle as I skate away on my heelies.

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April 20th, 2021

         It's a bunch of galaxies. I had written a whole little fun writeup about them, but my internet choked and I lost it. If another soul actually reads this and wishes they could have read my post: the objects in the picture have been helpfully annotated with plate-solving in PixInsight. Learn about these galaxies yourself you big mooch.

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April 16th, 2021

         Not too shabby for a noisy and windy 30 minutes of light. Still, this is a very bright object and while impressive without context, this was kind of a thin and overprocessed capture for this object. Still many times better than my shot about a year ago!

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April 14th, 2021

         Whoooa cowabunga dude, it's a spiral galaxy at an oblique angle. M108 lies about 46 million lightyears away in constellation Ursa Major, i.e. The Big Dipper. Closer observation has shown that it's a large and active galaxy, containing a ULX, a supermassive black hole center, and momentous sprays of gas from star formation known as Supershells. While its distance makes it small in the sky compared to others, it's bright enough that it can be visually observed with a small telescope under dark skies. (Though, manage your enthusiasm, no visual observation of a galaxy will show the details that deep-sky imaging can).

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April 8th, 2021

         Remember when I said I accidentally imaged a galaxy twice this season? Well this was the first shot.

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March 29th, 2021

         This one is a large, bright, and oh-so-evenly dispersed unbarred spiral about 46 million lightyears away in Ursa Major. If you ever hear someone say that a galaxy is "flocculent": this is the classic example of the trait. It means that instead of well defined arms as one sees in a so-called "grand design" spiral, or the complex messiness of multi-arm spirals: flocculent galaxies are serene and spread-out things, more closely resembling a zen garden than a turbulent vortex. If they have arms, then they are fluffy and discontiguous. Andromeda is similar in this regard, and in fact, such spirals aren't uncommon. They make up about 30% of the spirals known.

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March 27th, 2021

          Messier 94. Another galaxy. This one is only 16Mly away in Canes Venatici. Plenty to know about it, available elsewhere. Can't write an epic poem about every sparkly thing I photograph, I've been at this backlog all morning.

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March 22nd, 2021

          An enchanting trio of side on spiral galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, 55 million lightyears away (NGC 4216, in the center), 60 million lightyears away (NGC 4222 up top), and 70 million lightyears away (4206, bottom). They almost appear like a wing of fighter planes in formation. Each has their own peculiarities, (like the two satellite galaxies 4216 is thought to have absorbed), and ideed, so do the two on the right side: NGC 4189 (top), and NGC 4193 (bottom). Love to chat about them but I'm picking my battles here.

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March 20th, 2021

          Look, more galaxies. That big elliptical (i.e. boring round blob) is M105 and is about 36.6 Mly away in Leo. I don't have time for these clowns.

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March 10th, 2021

          I won't lie, this galaxy is super interesting and involves two counter-rotating discs. At this point, however, I'm just appending any writeups that I did at the time of capture. This one is about 17.3 Mly away in Canes Venatici. It's a nice bright and easy galaxy to observe due to such nearness. Check it out some time, why don't you.

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March 3rd, 2021

         This shot is only a 22-minute integration of Messier 81 or "Bode's Galaxy", and the limited exposure time was the result of clouds; the kind that show up until I pack up, and are gone by the time I've put everything away.

         The galaxy itself is only about 11.7-lightyears away, however, so even with such a short integration it's quite the sight. While it went down in Messier's catalogue, it was only a reidentification, because this one was very clearly staked out by one man only, Johann Elert Bode who called dibs in 1774 (incidentally the same man with the idea of calling Uranus "Uranus" and not "Neptune George" as others had suggested.)

         The galaxy is an SA(s)ab or intermediate "grand design" spiral, featuring two distinct and tightly wound arms spanning about 90,000 lightyears, from 2/3rds to 1/2 as large as the estimated size of the Milky Way. It features very active star formation, and a supernova observed in 1993. It is both a part of our own 'local group' as well as its namesake M81 group.

         Appearing in the lower-left of the image is M82, "the Cigar Galaxy". Bode discovered this one as well, but didn't claim it for himself. While originally thought to be an amorphous 'irregular' galaxy, it was discovered to have spiral arms 2005 with near-infrared imaging. This nearly side-on galaxy sees a tremendous amount of star formation—tenfold more than normal—due to density waves thought to have originated from a prior collision with M81. It was home to a supernova in 2014 and is also the location of the brightest known pulsar, M82 X-2, luminous enough to radiate powerfully in all the way into the x-ray spectrum. The less that is said of this pulsar, the better.

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March 2nd, 2021

         This object is M97 aka NGC 3587, aka "The Owl Nebula" and I think it's just a hoot. Since the night of the 2nd was so calm and warm for this time of year, I lavished some extra attention on this one—so the integration was an hour and twenty minutes of light— despite it being a fairly simple object. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain when observing with his friend and colleague Charles Messier (no they weren't really archrivals as I've suggested), and thus was recorded in Messier's catalogue. Méchain is basically the Luigi of famous French astronomers.

         This little green Dragon Ball is an 8,000 year-old starburst planetary nebula about 2,030 ly away, and not an unusual sight in the universe. In fact, this happens to every star from 1/6th all the way up to 10 times the sun's mass. Therefore, this is something that will happen right here in our solar system. It will absolutely be unpleasant for anyone still here, but the sun will have likely scorched all life from the planet some 4 billion years before this happens, about one billion years from now.

         This is all caused by the sun just doing what stars do and fusing hydrogen. When the hydrogen in its core is finally all fused up, a star this size will still be able to carry out fusion of all the helium it's created. It does this in a shell around a layer of carbon and oxygen, and further out it maintains another shell of hydrogen still fusing. This causes the core to shrink, but produce quite a bit more heat, which pushes the outer layers further out in order to cool off as much gravity will allow.

         Once again the star achieves equilibrium as a luminous, red, swollen parody of itself. When the sun does this it will expand enough to swallow Earth and the planets inside our orbit, like "Saturn devouring his son" the sun is also a terrible parent. If you're familiar with the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (shows the correlation between the luminousity, color, temperature, and spectral class of the stars), a star making this transition has entered the so-called asymptotic giant branch (AGB). This is one of the final paroxysms of death for the star, and lasts for the blink of an eye in star lifetimes, 10,000-100,000 years.

         Then the helium runs out. Stars being self sustained nuclear explosions, this all happens explosively. The guttering shell of helium lets the star cool and shrink enough that helium made in the outer hydrogen shell manages to enter and ignite in the helium shell. A helium shell flash is thrown off, and a massive uptick in brightness occurs. This repeats potentially quite a few times. This causes the hydrogen layer to destabilize, expanding until it extiguishes and then collapsing until it reignites. If the helium flashes were the terminal breath of the star, then this pulsing is the star really, finally evacuating its bowels and croaking.

         What's left is a white dwarf: a stellar core remnant made of 'degenerate electron matter' where the gravity is strong enough to make the gaseous atoms immobile against each other, as if they were a solid, but not enough for fusion. They glow only to slowly radiate residual heat. The AGB phase has ended.

         Notice how I say it's a core remnant. All of those convulsions of brightening in the AGB phase were enough to blast most of the star out into space in a series of glowing, interacting shells. Those are called a circumstellar envelope or CSE, and that is what you are looking at with M97- the Owl. They grow to encompass about 30 lightyears across in the ~50,000 years they hang around, glowing and dissipating. Since I'm apparently really going in on the death metaphors: this is the star's ghost leaving it's body. Most nebulae are baby showers, so these are really goth nebulae by comparison.

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About This Page:

“All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place.”

          What if you could use a camera, a bucket, and some mirrors in your backyard to see backwards in time over billions of years and sextillions of miles? Well, that's basically what I do for fun (basically). What began as a fascination with books and old documentaries about space in my early teens turned into a persistent interest, and a source of inspiration and wonderment. In the early Summer of 2019, this took a turn that transformed my largely passive interest into an actively enthralling, purpose-defining, and wallet depleting pursuit: I bought my first real telescope, and began taking photos through it. After nearly a year I have realized that astronomy is an irreducible calling, and aside from my professional aspirations, amateur astronomy and astrophotography are the most challenging and rewarding hobbies I've ever enjoyed. To that end, this website is meant to showcase and document my own progress in those areas, but more importantly: to serve as a resource and maybe even an inspiration to others who are walking the same path. Below are some examples of the types of astrophotography I do.