Thursday, April 24, 2008

A Pause in the Posts

I have been a bit lax in posting to my blog. I would like to say that I have been out doing astrophotography, but that is simply not so, given the weather lately.

I have, however, been doing a bit of work with some of the images that I have already taken, as seen below:

Nebulousity around the star, Deneb, in the constellation Cygnus. The nebulousity contains the "North American Nebula". The North American Nebula is below, and to the left of Deneb, the bright star in the image.



This is an image of the sword in the constellation Orion. The top star is actually the "Running Man Nebula. You can see what seems to be a shadow of a man running in the glowing gas in the top of the image. The center in the famous "Orion Nebula" This is a "stellar nursery", an area of dense gas that is collapsing to form young stars. You can see this gas around the center of the sword, and also looping down to the bottom star in the sword.



In the image above, you can see the Milky Way as it appears from the Blue Ridge Parkway, south of Roanoke. Located in the area of whitish gases above the highest treetop is the area of the center of our galaxy. Behind all those stars and gases is the Milky Ways' massive "Black Hole". In case you don't think that light pollution is bad, the glow of light around the bottom of the image is wasted light from Rocky Mount. VA, and Martinsville VA.



Here is an image I shot of a "Full Moon" in 2007. In case you are wondering, there was no colored filter in this image. This is the color of the moon as it rose that evening.

I hope to get more shooting time in the near future, so keep an eye on this blog.