Images of space from my backyard:
To see a list organized by catalog numbers, click here. For reverse chronological order, keep scrolling.
What follows is a general explanation of how these are captured. Feel free to scroll past if you just want to see the results.
Deep sky objects, like nebulae, are very dim and require many hours of exposure to capture properly. However, a multi-hour exposure would require an impossibly precise mount and could easily be ruined by passing satellites and clouds. Instead, I take multiple shorter exposures, which I then align and combine together into a single image. This allows any imperfect frames to be removed, without throwing away more then a few seconds of data.
The final step is using a non-linear "stretch" function to brighten up the fainter parts of the image, bringing the dynamic range down to something that can be displayed on a monitor.
Some of these photos are narrowband or "false color" images, for which I used filters to capture very specific parts of the spectrum, and then (rather arbitrarily) assigned them RGB colors. In these cases, I list the palette used as something like this: "Oxygen-Hydrogen-Sulfur", which would indicate that the red channel is the Oxygen-III line, green is Hydrogen-alpha and blue is Sulfur-II.
Planets and moons are very bright, but very small, with the views easily being spoiled by atmospheric distortion. To deal with this, I record a high frame rate video in hopes of catching a brief moment of perfect atmospheric conditions. I then stack together the sharpest frames from that video and apply wavelet sharpening to bring out the details.
M27: The Dumbbell Nebula
NGC 7822: Pillars in the question mark
M16: The eagle nebula
3I/ATLAS: A highly hyperbolic comet
NGC 6979: Part of the Veil Nebula
NGC 6543: Halo of the Cat's Eye Nebula
NGC 7635: The bubble nebula
M94: Cat's Eye Galaxy
IC 1396A: Elephant's Trunk
NGC 6888: Crescent Nebula
M57: The Ring nebula
NGC 7023: The Iris Nebula
M13: The Hercules cluster
NGC 4565: The needle galaxy
M101: The pinwheel galaxy
Arp 18
Arp 138
Arp 84
Arp 214 + Hickson 56
Hickson 44: A galaxy cluster
M 82: The cigar galaxy
NGC 4438: The eyes
NGC 40: The bowtie nebula
M 88 / NGC 4501
M 3: A globular cluster
NGC4676: The mice galaxies
NGC 4490 + NGC 4485: Cocoon Galaxy
M 51: Whirlpool galaxy
M 81: Bode's galaxy
NGC 3628: The hamburger galaxy
NGC 2903: A spiral galaxy
M 1: The Crab Nebula
M 42: Orion nebula (Narroband)
Jupiter (at full focal length)
Half moon
M42: Orion nebula (mosaic)
Barnard 33: The Horsehead nebula
The full moon
NGC 2024: The Flame Nebula
Jupiter
M42: The orion nebula (early attempts)
