Category: Images

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The Horsehead Nebula (B33)

Horsehead Nebula
The Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33)

You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock. 
Isaiah 26:3-4

The Horsehead Nebula is one of my favorite objects in the night sky. It’s a small dark nebula located just south of the left star in Orion’s Belt. It lies in front of a large star forming region, IC 434, which is basically a big cloud of hydrogen that is ionizing and creating the beautiful and intense red color. 

This nebula is a part of the Orion cloud complex which consists of many interest points (more of which is to come soon). It was discovered in 1888 by a Scottish astronomer on a photographic plate and cataloged as Barnard 33 (or B33). The nebula lies south of the left most star in Orion’s Belt, Alnitak.

Horsehead Nebula Black and White
The black and white version of the image provides more contrast to get a good view of the details of the emission nebula IC 434 behind the horsehead.

The most fascinating part of the ionized region behind the Horsehead is the magnetic fields which, if you look closely enough, channel the gases into whispy streams like rivers on a map.

The 27.5 hours of exposure time reveal the heavy concentration of dust all around the Horsehead that look like a slight brownish glow. The image was captured over 6 nights.

Horsehead Nebula Starless
A starless version of the image. The star removal tool I use has a hard time removing Alnitak in Orion’s Belt in the left corner of the image as well as HD 37903 just under the Horsehead. Alnitak is a blue super giant star and is so bright that it can create some difficult conditions to process around

Technical info:
– Total integration time: 27.5 hours

Processing: Stacked with Deep Sky Stacker (using Kappa-Sigma method), color calibrated, background extraction, and StarNet star removal in Siril, stretched and further color correction in Adobe Photoshop, denoised using GraXpert, then final star recomposition in Siril. 

Equipment used:
– Telescope: Astro-Tech AT130ED + 0.8x reducer/flattener (f5.6)
– Mount: @SkyWatcherUSA AZ-EQ6 Pro
– Camera: ZWO ASI533MC Pro
– Autoguider: 60mm svbony scope + asi120mm mini
– Filter: Optolong L-Extreme

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Total Lunar Eclipse March 2025

The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes
Joel 2:31

Pi day blood moon! 4 photo HDR image merged in Lightroom. I thought it was going to be clouded over but about 20 minutes before totality the clouds cleared! I got a great view of it through my Nikon D800 and Nikon 200-500mm f5.6 as well as my 20 x 80 astronomy binoculars!

Observing/imaging from my apartment balcony

Some information on yesterday’s early morning blood moon from NASA’s APOD:

On March 14 the Moon was Full. In an appropriate celebration of Pi day, that put the Moon 3.14 radians (180 degrees) in ecliptic longitude from the Sun in planet Earth’s sky. As a bonus for fans of Pi and the night sky, on that date the Moon also passed directly through Earth’s umbral shadow in a total lunar eclipse. In clear skies, the colors of an eclipsed Moon can be vivid. Reflecting the deeply reddened sunlight scattered into Earth’s shadow.

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Mars and Moon Occultation January 2025

for by wise guidance you can wage your war, and in abundance of counselors there is victory.
Proverbs 24:6

Watch Mars pass behind the Moon during the Moon and Mars occultation! This was on January 13th 2025! Close up video was captured with a 6 inch GSO Classical Cassegrain telescope and a ZWO ASI462MC mounted on a ZWO AM3. 

SharpCap was used to film the event on my laptop and the frames were processed using AutoStakkert for stacking and Registax for wavelet sharpening. 

Each video was just under 6000 frames. I extracted each frame, grouped them into groups of 300 and stacked them. Then applied a wavelet sharpening to each image. Each image was then put in davinci resolve to create a video. 

Setting behind the Moon

Rising on the other side

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The Orion Nebula

{“shape”: [2831, 3231, 3]}

The Lord reigns; he is robed in majesty; the Lord is robed; he has put on strength as his belt. Yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved. Your throne is established from of old; you are from everlasting.

Psalm 93:1-2

The Orion Nebula is one of the brightest nebulas and closest star forming regions in the night sky. A very popular object by both imagers and visual astronomers, its great brightness makes it a spectacular view for both. Under a dark sky, the nebula can be seen with the naked eye as a fuzzy patch in the center star in the sword of the Orion constellation. 

One of the most fascinating features of the Orion Nebula is the Trapezium of stars at its center. Here is some info from NASA on the Trapezium:

“The bright central region is the home of the four most massive stars in the nebula. The stars are called the Trapezium because they are arranged in a trapezoid pattern. Ultraviolet light unleashed by these stars is carving a cavity in the nebula and influencing the growth of hundreds of smaller stars. Located near the Trapezium are stars still young enough to have disks of material encircling them. These disks are called protoplanetary disks or “proplyds” and are too small to see clearly in this image. The disks are the building blocks of planetary systems.”

This image was taken over two nights and consists of 11 hours and 40 minutes of exposure time. 

Equipment used:

Telescope: Astro-Tech AT130ED + 0.8x reducer/flattener (f5.6)

Mount: SkyWatcher AZ-EQ6 Pro

Camera: ZWO ASI533MC Pro

Autoguider: 60mm svbony scope + asi120mm mini

Filter: Optolong L-Extreme

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THE PLEIADES

M45 Pleiades open star cluster

He who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning and darkens the day into night, who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out on the surface of the earth, the Lord is his name;
Amos 5:8

The Pleiades (Messier 45), also known as the “Seven Sisters” is an open star cluster near the constellation Taurus. At 444 light years, it is one of the closest star cluster to our solar system. It is easily visible with the naked eye, even in light polluted skies. The blue color comes from the hot temperature of the stars in the cluser that formed within the last 100 million years.

Within the star cluster is the nebula NGC 1432. A reflection type nebula, which has been identified as a HII region. Reflection nebula are clouds of dust and gas that are not ionized like emission nebula, and therefore do not emit light. They can only be seen by the light reflecting off of them from nearby stars, requiring longer exposure times to see them and reveal their details. This reflection nebula is not locked into the cluster and is estimated to be moving at 18 km/s relative to the cluster.

The Pleiades has been recognized as a point of interest by many people groups throughout history. The Holy Bible mentions the Pleiades by name three times, once in the book of Amos and twice in the book of Job, which are both among the oldest books in the Bible. Some other interesting history bits from Wikipedia, In Mesopotamia, the MUL.APIN compendium, the first known Mesopotamian astronomy treatise, discovered at Nineveh in the library of Assurbanipal and dating from no later than 627 BC, presents a list of deities [holders of stars] who stand on “the path of the Moon” which includes the Pleiades. In some Turkish communities, the year was divided into two seasons based on the visibility and invisibility of the Pleiades in the night sky, which is between November and May.

Equipment used:
Telescope: Astro-Tech AT60ED + 1.0x field flattener (f6)
Mount: ZWO AM3
Camera: ZWO ASI533MC Pro
Autoguider: 30mm svbony scope + asi120mm mini
Filter: Optolong UV/IR cut filter

This image consists of over 1100 90 second exposures stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and processed in Siril and Photoshop. GraxPert was used for denoising.

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M16 & THE PILLARS OF CREATION

M16 Eagle Nebula Starless

Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable Isaiah 40:28

At the heart of M16 The Eagle Nebula lie a structure of interstellar gas and dust called the Pillars of Creation. First discovered by John Charles Duncan in 1920 at Mount Wilson Observatory using their 60 inch telescope. The structure is named so because the gas and dust are in the process of creating new stars, while also being eroded by the light from nearby stars that have recently formed. It was made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 when we got our first close up view of it. 

My image was taken this last summer with my 60mm telescope. It’s about 3.5 hours of exposure time. At first you see a starless version so you can see all of the fine detail in the nebula. 

Next summer I’d like to shoot this object again but with my longer focal length Schmidt Cassegrain telescope to pickup more detail in the core. 

Image was stacked in Deep Sky Stacker, processed in Siril, denoised using GraxPert, and finishing touches and adjustments done in Photoshop. 

Equipment used:
Telescope: Astro-Tech AT60ED + 1.0x field flattener (f6)
Mount: ZWO AM3
Camera: ZWO ASI533MC Pro
Autoguider: 30mm svbony scope + asi120mm mini
Filter: Optolong L-Extreme