If you’ve ever looked up at the winter sky and noticed a tight little knot of blue-white stars, you’ve already met the Pleiades. M45 is one of those objects that’s been observed, mythologized, and photographed more times than almost anything else in the sky — and yet there’s a reason people keep coming back to it.
Continue reading M45: The Pleiades 🌟This one has been on my radar for a while — and I finally did it justice.
I’ve pointed a telescope at the Cone Nebula before, but from my Bortle 8 backyard in Atlanta, I couldn’t pull much out of it. Light pollution is the enemy of faint nebulosity, and this region has plenty of both. Moving my rig to Starfront Observatories out near Brady, Texas — where the skies are genuinely dark — changed everything. Nearly 48 hours of integration time later, this is what came back.
Continue reading The Cone Nebula, Christmas Tree Cluster & Hubble’s Variable Nebula 🎄🔭A Deep Narrowband Study of One of Amateur Astronomy’s Recent Discoveries
In an era where we think everything in the night sky has been catalogued, it’s remarkable that a massive nebula nearly a degree across remained undiscovered until 2011. The Giant Squid Nebula (Ou4) is a testament to what modern narrowband imaging can reveal—and a reminder that amateur astrophotographers are still making real discoveries.
Continue reading The Flying Bat & The Giant Squid: Sh2-129 and Ou4Of all the objects in the night sky, few capture the imagination quite like M42—the Great Orion Nebula. Visible to the naked eye as a fuzzy “star” in Orion’s sword, even under moderately light-polluted skies, it’s been observed for millennia. This was one of the first deep-space objects I ever tried to photograph (back around 2018), but there’s always something new to discover.
Continue reading M42: The Great Orion Nebula & The Running Man
