Recent Shots of the Cosmos

I've  got a few projects that I am working on right now that I will eventually blog about, but they're not quite finished, so I thought I would just drop some of my recent astrophotos here instead.

Last weekend I was at Joshua Tree National Park for their Night Sky Festival. I was running a telescope for Unistellar and showing off the coolest astronomical objects of the night sky. I was also on a secret mission to show a few objects that were part of a theme that led up to a successful marriage proposal. The final object just before the question was popped was NGC 6781, the Little Ring Nebula:

The Little Ring Nebula is a planetary nebula which is a bubble of gas that is being given off by a dying star. It is located a few thousand light years from our Solar System in the constellation of Aquila, the Eagle.

Also, located in Aquila is the dark nebula known as Barnard 143, which, along with Barnard 142, makes up what is sometimes called Barnard's E. 

Like with the other dark nebulae I've blogged about it is a dense cloud of cosmic dust that is blocking the light of the stars behind it. 

Our Milky Way galaxy is dusty, which is typical of spiral galaxies. We can see these dust clouds in our own galaxy and we can see them in other galaxies too, such as this one:

NGC 891 is a spiral galaxy that we are seeing from the side, which make its dust lanes easy to spot. It is located nearly 30 million light years away in the direction of the constellation of Andromeda. 

Here's another galaxy located in Andromeda. It is both closer and smaller than NGC 891.

The really bright thing is a red giant star in our own galaxy known as Mirach (aka Beta Andromedae). It's about 200 light years from us. The galaxy in this image is the fuzzy smudge that is up and left from Mirach. It is cataloged as NGC 404 and often referred to as Mirach's Ghost, because it almost looks like a reflection of the brighter star. Mirach's Ghost is a dwarf galaxy that's around 3 times closer to us than NGC 891 is. 

That's all for now. I've got an elusive object to try to hunt down.