Nebulae Of The Night Sky

This gallery contains the photographs where the featured objects are bright nebula.

You may click on an image to see it along with a description. Once the picture and description shows up you may do another click on the picture to expand it as large as can be done with your browser window so make the browser window large. The browser 'back' key will work as well.

Bright means that these nebula offer light that can be seen but in many cases it is quite dim when viewed visually through most telescopes. The images have had the dim features brought out a bit in order to better show the fairly faint and delicate structures of these wonderful objects of the night sky.

I encourage people to look up the object identifications I mention on the web as there are a wealth of very colorful pictures done by very talented astrophotographers available. The objects that start with 'M' are objects from the very well known list assembled by Charles Messier in the early years of astronomy.

The descriptions for each individual picture are written to be of interest to a wide audience that includes my friends and family. Some of the technical descriptions of how the pictures were taken are presented below as optional reading for the curious.

All of the widefield shots are taken using a canon 200mm f/2.8 prime focus lens in front of a Qsi583ws CCD camera. The long exposures require autoguiding which is done using a Stellarvue F80 f/3.7 finder scope combined with the Orion starshoot autoguider hooked up to PHD autoguider software. The mount is either a Losmandy G-11 or as of October 2010 it is an AP900. Processing is mostly done using PixInsight.

Thanks for looking, Mark Johnston (AKA AstroSpotter)

All the images in www.astrospotter.zenfolio.com are Copyright Mark E. Johnston and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.