„Lift up your eyes to heaven and see. Who has created these things?
It is the One who brings out their army by number; He calls them all by name.
Because of his vast dynamic energy and his awe-inspiring power, Not one of them is missing (…)”

Middle Eastern poem about the stars, 8th century BCE

Our recent pictures

How do we take astrophotos?

What kind of equipment is needed to take these pictures

People keep asking us if these pictures are made by us. They are. Really. This is the equipment we use.

Bubble Nebula

NGC 7635 / Sharpless 162 / Caldwell 11, NGC 7538, M52 / NGC 7654

This is an actual bubble - altough it is 7 light-years across. That is 1.5x the distance to the nearest star to us. The hot young star in the center of the bubble is shedding its outer layers (it is a Wolf-Rayet star, SAO 20575). While that mass is being blown away from the star by the stellar wind it is also excited by the intense radiation. The nearby molecular cloud is glowing for the same reason. This star is going to become a supernova in about 10-20 million years and will collapse into a black hole.

Iris Nebula

NGC 7023 / Caldwell 4

The Iris Nebula is a reflection nebula, which means it is made of dust and is illuminated by starlight (in the visible spectrum). In this case, by the bright star visible in the center. The nebula itself is very bright, just below the human eye’s perception threshold (which is about 10 photons hitting the same cell in a tenth of second). It is 6 light-years in diamater and is about 1,300 light-years away from Earth.

Pelican Nebula

IC 5070 & 5067

This beutiful star formation region is easy to find in the sky. Deneb, a magnitude 1.25 star, is just out frame (near the top left corner). The image is SHO palette (Sulphur/Hydrogen/Oxygen gas).

Pinwheel Galaxy

M101 / NGC 5457 / SN 2023ixf

Altough our images often (though unintentionally) feature small extremely far & faint galaxies, M101 is the furthest away target that we have choosen so far. It is a whooping 21 million light-years away! Something to think about: if M101 was bright enough for the naked eye to see, it would look almost exactly the same size as the full Moon; it is however 517,383,697,916,666x further away than the Moon; so, how big is it??

M53

NGC 5024

This globular cluster was discovered in 1775, but it is a truly ancient object, 12.6 billion years old, only 1 billion years younger than the Universe itself. Another fact that makes it outstanding is that there are many first-generation stars in this cluster. As in, they were not formed from matter generated by previous stars, but are the first concentrations of mass.

Articles

How do we take astrophotos?

What kind of equipment is needed to take these pictures

People keep asking us if these pictures are made by us. They are. Really. This is the equipment we use.

Etcetera

Assorted throwaway pancakes

More often than not astrophotos don’t come out the way you planned them to. There are about 200 steps involved in taking a picture, and they all have to be right. Also, often we need to experiment, finetune equipment or the sky is not good enough for long enough to finish a project. These are some examples of failures and experiments.