I always like to see how much imagination you need to have to see how the name of a nebula aligns with what we see in the image. We've had…
Can you spot the Elephant's Trunk in the image? The large round and dark section at the top, is the elephant's head. The hole represents the elephant's eye. And the…
NGC 7129 is a reflection nebula located in the constellation Cepheus. Located 3,300 light years away, NGC 7129 is a young open cluster of newborn stars. Many of the stars within the cluster are less than 1 million years old, which is very young when you consider many of these stars will live to be many billions of years old. The gaseous features are the left over ingredients for star formation.
NGC 7129 is a reflection nebula. Reflection nebulas reflect light from nearby stars while emission nebulas generate light from ionized gases. Reflection nebulas are images through red, green, and blue filters while emission nebulas are best imaged with narrowband filters (Sulphur-II, Hydrogen-Alpha, Oxygen-III).
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The Pacman Nebula is something I’ve been wanting to image for quite some time. Mostly because it looks like what it is called… Pacman. NGC 281 is a very bright emission nebula in Cassiopeia only 9,200 light years away. Emission nebulas emit light due to ionized gases within the cloud.
To date, this is the longest image I’ve ever captured, coming in at 30 hours of imaging time! And more amazingly, I’ve had 9 nights of clear skies over the course of about 3 weeks. It usually would take 1-2 months to get this amount of imaging time.
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