The Lagoon Nebula

The Lagoon Nebula, M8, is another remarkable region where new stars are being formed. It is a giant glowing cloud of interstellar gas lit up by nearby stars. It is divided by a dark lane of dust and it also contains an embedded cluster NGC 6530 whose stars have been newly formed from the nebular material.

The Eagle Nebula

M16, the Eagle Nebula, is one of several spectacular objects now coming into view in the summer evening sky. It has been made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope “Pillars of Creation” photograph - easily the most ubiquitous of all Hubble images.

Changes and Improvements

I’d like to call your attention to some changes and improvements to this blog in the past week or so as I try to make the site more enjoyable to browse.

The Pleiades

The Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters and Messier 45, are an open star cluster containing hot middle-aged stars in the constellation Taurus. It is among the star clusters nearest to Earth and is the cluster most obvious to the naked eye in the night sky. Most people can see the 6 or 7 brightest stars that form a smallish “dipper” – NOT to be confused with the Little Dipper (Ursa Minor constellation).

The Supernova in Galaxy M61 is Hanging in There

This is an update to my May 16 post. The sky was clear and moonless last Friday night, so I was able to check back in on the M61 supernova. A month later, it has faded only a little bit. I’m happy to report that the “seeing” was better this night, so this image shows somewhat more detail in the galaxy compared to my earlier images.

A field of galaxies near M49

Here is an interesting field of galaxies in the constellation Virgo. The brightest is Messier 49, an elliptical galaxy. It is perhaps five times larger than our Milky Way galaxy and about 60 million light years distant. Since elliptical galaxies have no discernable structure, they just appear as fuzzy blobs.

The Needle Galaxy

NGC 4565, the Needle Galaxy, is one of the most prominent and famous edge-on spiral galaxies in the sky.

The Perseus Double Cluster

Two for the price of one! The Double Cluster consists of two open star clusters, known as H and Chi Persei (also called NGC 884 and 869).

The Andromeda Galaxy

If you’ve ever seen a picture of another galaxy, odds are that it was of this one, the Andromeda galaxy, also known as M31. At a distance of 2.54 million light years from us, it is closer and hence appears larger than any other galaxy (apart from the two Magellanic Clouds in the southern hemisphere that are small satellites of our Milky Way). And it is on a collision course with us and will collide with our Milky Way in about four billion years.

Open Clusters

Scattered mostly along the Milky Way are stellar groupings called open clusters, randomly shaped families of mostly young, hot stars that are all gravitationally bound to each other. Most stars are born in such clusters, containing anything between perhaps twenty to a few thousand stars. All of the stars in a given cluster are about the same age, having formed together from the same nebula.