Clouds of Orion (Galactic Hunter) is the name of this 56 panes mosaic image I captured between October 2014 and March 2015 of the Orion constellation, featuring a large number of well-known objects, from the Horsehead nebula, to the Orion nebula, Barnard's loop, Witchhead nebula and many others. The image accumulates 242 hours of exposure time (1over 2,000 total individual exposures), meaning you're looking at the light captured by a CCD camera during 242 hours.
The field of view in the image is about 32.5 x 22.2 degrees (39.5 diagonal). To put this in perspective, the Moon's diameter is only 1/2 degree, meaning you could fit a total of 1,443 Moons in this image - at the scale it would show if it had been up in the sky - without overlapping.
It's probably the largest image of this entire area captured by an astrophotographer at this size, depth and resolution so far (exclude professional sky surveys, of course!).
Tags: orion nebula sky night stars horsehead belt space astronomy molecular cloud Betelgeuse witchhead
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Here's my latest deep-sky image, featuring the group of galaxies known as the Leo Triplet (right-down off the center) in an unusually wide and deep view.
The tidal "tail" of the galaxy NGC 3628 is actually extremely faint. Most images of this area barely show any tail at all (do an image search on "Leo Triplet"), and the extrerme difference in brightness between the tail and the galaxy has been greatly reduced by both, pulling the detail of the tail from the noise floor, and using HDR compression on the galaxies.
Tags: leo triplet deepsky astrophotography stars galaxy galaxies tidal tail
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I took this image, also being featured on NASA's APOD page today June 2, 2015 (apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150602.html), a bit over a week ago. While it might not seem as much, what you see here is a comet (the green ball, designated as C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy) cruising near one of the most famous stars in our sky: Polaris, the Northern Star. The comet does not feature the flashy tail most people expect when they picture a comet, but as a bonus, the image does feature a large amount of dense high galactic latitude nebulae that due to being very faint, it is often neglected in astroimages.
Tags: comet lovejoy polaris northern star IFN nebula north pole star astrophotography deep sky deep space APOD
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The image I posted yesterday of the comet Lovejoy and Polaris was taken on May 24,2015. Four nights later I went to Henry Coe State Park and took another shot at the comet, which had grown both a tail and an anti-tail, right at the time it was as "closer" to Polaris as it will get. Hope you like it!
Tags: comet lovejoy astronomy space polaris star stars nightscape deep space sky tail
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Can you count how many stars are visible in this image? This is just a tiny view of our Milky Way galaxy, around the area where the Lagoon Nebula (the large red structure) resides. Every single sun you see here is part of our galaxy, many with orbiting planets for sure... Life? Possibly, somewhere... BTW I used a software to actually count the number of stars in the image and the result - which may be more or less accurate - is 148,891 single dots of light, and I suspect there's more than that.
Tags: astrophotography deepsky stars night nebula Milky Way Trifid Lagoon space sky long exposure astro astronomy galaxy night sky
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