I have a deep love for astronomy but I also love photography. I try and take astrophotography photos but I mostly take photos of landscapes and objects. There are two sets of photos on this page:
- My personal photography
- Photos I’ve used in all my posts (some are awesome as desktop wallpapers!
Comet NEOWISE – Close up
Comet NEOWISE – 2020 – Portrait shot with stars
Caption
Orion’s Belt & Wispy Sky
Crescent Moon & Jet Plane
Third Quarter Moon
Urban Night Stars & Meteorites
Researcher Laser & Stars
Stars
Stars & Meteorites
Mystical Moon
Milky Way & Tobermory
Milky Way & Meteorites
Milky Way & Stars
Tobermory House & Stars
Tree and Stars
Chimney & Moon
Cozy House & Moon
My Panasonic GX7 with Gordy Strap
My weapon of choice for photography. Panasonic GX7 with 20mm lens
New York City Night Sky
Moon & Flower
Sunset Over Dione
This is a gorgeous image of a sunset over Dione (pronounced die-OH-nee). Dione is one of Saturn’s moons and is the 15th largest moon in the solar system. If you combine all the smaller moons together it would still not be bigger than Dione. It has a 1:2 orbital mean resonance with Enceladus which means that for every orbit Dione completes (2.7 Earth days), Enceladus will have completed 2 by then. Dione is mostly made up of ice and has a diameter of 1122 km. It is also the third densest Saturnian moon and has the distance of...
read moreMethuselah Star: Older than Universe? Not Quite
Have you ever wondered what star in our record books is considered the oldest star in the universe? Well Hubble Space telescope studied the Methuselah star and retrieved some interesting data. They found a star to be 14.5 billion (+/- .8 billion) years old and it’s located right in our own Milky Way! The distance of the star was calculated to be 190.1 light years away from Earth. Even though there is a large amount of commotion saying it is older than the universe some say it isn’t. There is a margin of error that goes along with...
read moreWhat is a Kilonova?
What is a Kilonova? NASA astronomers have found an intense cosmic event called a “kilonova.” A kilonova is an explosion so powerful that it’s 1000 times stronger than a normal supernova. To help put this in some perspective think about this. The amount of energy a Sun (like the size of our own) produces in its 10 billion life time equals to the amount of energy an average supernova produces. Still not helping? Well think about the amount of energy of the atomic bomb Little Boy outputs (the one dropped on Hiroshima)...
read moreYoung Stars Forming in NGC 602
NGC 602 is a young bright cluster of stars located in the Small Magellanic Clouds. For those of you who don’t know the Small Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy that is 7000 light years wide (compared to our 400,000 light year width of the Milky Way). Fun fact is that this dwarf galaxy had the unfortunate run in with our beast of a galaxy and transformed into an irregular shape galaxy. It is also 200,000 light years away but it’s one of the closest neighbours to our own galaxy. In the image you can see that the radiation and shock...
read moreNew COSMOS Trailer
Why Haven’t You Seen the new COSMOS Trailer? If you haven’t seen the new COSMOS trailer then read no more and just watch the video! COSMOS is a famous series led by my main man Carl Sagan. It inspired so many people like myself to wonder more about the universe. It made me realize how beautiful and awesome astronomy is and how we don’t look up enough. The trailer plays the epic card pretty hard but we are talking about Neil deGrasse Tyson here and the universe! So it seems fairly accurate to make it epic....
read moreWhere Have Meteors Fallen on Earth and What Are the Differences?
A very common question we all ask is where have meteors fallen on Earth? Also how big are these rocks or how heavy are they? These are good questions to ask to know the real danger of these space travellers. Well I took this first image from a cool facebook page called The Earth Story, check them out if you have time. VERY KNOWN METEORITE FALL ON EARTH This map shows every meteorite fall on Earth that we know about; where scientists have found either meteorites or impact craters. Some of these craters and meteorite fragments date as...
read moreThe Four Armed Spiral Galaxy M106
This is the gorgeous spiral galaxy M106 or also known as NGC 4258. It is located 23.5 million light years away and it would take you 80,000 light years to cross from one end of the galaxy to the other. What is interesting about this particular galaxy is the fact that it has an unusual amount of arms. It has 4 arms that are in spiral formation and the two arms that are mostly red (known as anomalous arms, because they don’t line up well with the other arms) is hydrogen that is spewing out from the supermassive black hole. That red color...
read moreDeadly Meteor Hits Russia Shocks World
Deadly Meteor Hits Russia Injures 750+ People Wow what a day! While everyone’s eyes were on 2012DA14 this surprise meteor comes out of nowhere over Russia. Not only that but there are tons of photos and footage on this! Sadly there have been at least 750 people reported injured. I first heard news from my main guy Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy and the story goes that at 9:30 a.m a meteor broke over Russia or 1500 km east of Moscow. It was in broad daylight and was even brighter than the sun! There was a sonic boom from...
read moreHow Asteroid 2012DA14 Could Potentially Wipe Out a Major City
credit: NASA 2012DA14 Killer Asteroid or Just Passing Neighbor? You may have already heard something about an asteroid passing by Earth today. Even more so, the closest predicted fly by on record. Well one question a lot of people have asked is if this asteroid will come swoop down and hit us. Well let’s take a closer look at the details of this asteroid. First off the size of the asteroid is about 50m (160 ft) which doesn’t sound like a whole lot because whenever a meteor or asteroid enters our atmosphere it burns up on...
read moreCoolest Animation of a Variable Red Star in Action (V838 Monocerotis)
V838 Monocerotis is located 20,000 light years away in the constellation Monoceros. It’s one of the most interesting red variable stars (variable star is a star whose brightness fluctuates as seen from Earth) because at first astronomers thought this was a classic case of a nova but in fact it’s something completely different and to make matters even juicier, they aren’t even sure why! This red star is 5-10 times the mass of our own Sun and has been seen rapidly heating up and expanding in matter of months! This is rarely...
read moreWhat are Blazars?
For most people they have only heard of cool space terms like black holes, supernovas or maybe even quasars. Well blazar isn’t a common term you’ll hear a lot and it’s actually not very different from a quasar. The picture above is essentially a blazar. It has an intensely bright central nucleus (or part of a classification called “active galactic nuclei” or AGN) containing a supermassive black hole. What’s really crazy about blazars is that the emitted light which sometimes includes extremely high...
read moreParting Moon Shots from GRAIL Mission
This is a gorgeous video of NASA’s two spacecraft’s Ebb and Flow spending a few moments staring at the moon before it crashes right into it. The reason why they are crashing into the moon is because they were running out of fuel and it’s much safer to crash them rather than leave them floating in space unattended. The goal of the GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) was to use high-quality gravitational field mapping of the Moon to determine its interior structure. Without further a due here are the parting moon...
read moreMind Blowing Neutron Star’s Spin
This movie from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shows a fast moving jet of particles produced by a rapidly rotating neutron star, and may provide new insight into the nature of some of the densest matter in the universe. The star of this movie is the Vela pulsar, a neutron star that was formed when a massive star collapsed. The Vela pulsar is about 1,000 light years from Earth, spansis about 12 miles in diameter, and makes over 11 complete rotations every second, faster than a helicopter rotor. (NASA) This is an incredible video...
read moreJust Watch This. A Flight Through the Universe
Watching this makes you feel like a spiritual being travelling through the cosmos. Amazing how even a galaxy as big as our own can just be a point of light in the sky.
read moreNew Clues for the History of Water on Mars
Recently news broke out when a martian meteorite (founded in the Moroccan dessert in 2011) revealed information about water on Mars. Professor Agee (lead scientist on this research paper) is arguing that this meteorite, nicknamed “Black Beauty”, is a very special rock because it has characteristics of a basaltic breccia rock (or a rock that has fragments of other rocks combined together by a volcano) and that there is 10 times amount of water bounded to the rock than what is normally found in other Martian rocks. This meteorite...
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