Astrophotography

Astrophotography is a great technical hobby. It involves interesting optics, automatic control for sub-arcsecond tracking, cooled cameras, and lots of signal and image processing. And there are all sorts of amazing objects out there to photograph.

Here are a couple of recent shots, all taken from my house on the Stanford campus.

This a bright nebula in Monocerous. It is overhead in winter, right below Gemini.

This is the open cluster M35 with its hot, young, bright blue stars next to the globular cluster NGC 2158 with its ancient stars. I like the star colors. This is right at the foot of Gemini.

M3 is one of the larger globular clusters. It is in Hercules.

This is a large, fairly bright planetary nebula in Aquarius.

This is one of my favorite parts of the sky. It has everything. There are emission neubula (red clouds), reflection nebula (blue and orange clouds), two globular clusters, dark nebula (the dark streaks), against a background of the edge of the Milky Way.

This is the Veil Nebula, a spectacular supernova remnant in Cygnus, directly overhead during the summer.

This is the Pleiades, which is a beautiful open cluster that is overhead in the late fall. This is a reflection nebula, with hot blue stars illuminating dust clouds from behind.

This is the recent green comet taken over half an hour.

This is the recent supernova in M101 which happenend on May 19, 2023. The image on the left was acqured three days earlier.