Kewlart Designs Gallery

05/22/2026

Hello all! Please visit my website, www.kewlartdesigns.com . It is my official gallery & print shop where I am featuring my 3 best pieces for sale on several mediums, as well as 2 mugs featuring these pieces. I also have a page where you can learn about the moon, and I can capture the moon just for you.

08/17/2025

Taken with my SeeStar S50, & processed in Siril, GraXpert & Affinity Photo 2 then reworked a bit in PixInsight with BlurXterminator & NoiseXterminator plugins.

The Trifid Nebula is a bright H II region located 4,100 light-years away in the southern constellation Sagittarius. With an apparent magnitude of 6.3 and an apparent size of 28 arcminutes, it can be easily observed in binoculars and small telescopes. The nebula is listed as Messier 20 (M20) in the Messier catalogue and NGC 6514 in the New General Catalogue.

The Trifid Nebula is one of the most striking Messier objects. It is a large star-forming region composed of three types of nebulae and a young open star cluster. The nebula has a diameter of 42 light years and lies in the Scutum-Centaurus Arm of the Milky Way.

The complex stellar nursery has a distinctive trifurcated appearance for which it is well known. The name Trifid means “divided into three lobes” and refers to the way the dark dust lanes appear to divide the nebula into three sections.

08/17/2025

The Whirlpool Galaxy, aka Messier20. I took this with my SeeStar S50 & processed it with PixInsight & Affinity Photo2.

From Nasa:
"The graceful, winding arms of the majestic spiral galaxy M51 appear like a grand spiral staircase sweeping through space. They are actually long lanes of stars and gas laced with dust. Such striking arms are a hallmark of so-called grand-design spiral galaxies. In M51, also known as the Whirlpool Galaxy, these arms serve an important purpose: they are star-formation factories, compressing hydrogen gas and creating clusters of new stars.

Some astronomers think that the Whirlpool’s arms are particularly prominent because of the effects of a close encounter with NGC 5195, the small, yellowish galaxy at the outermost tip of one of the arms. The compact galaxy appears to be tugging on the arm, the tidal forces from which trigger new star formation. Hubble’s clear view shows that NGC 5195 is passing behind M51. The small galaxy has been gliding past the Whirlpool for hundreds of millions of years.

In Hubble’s captivating image of M51, the red represents infrared light as well as hydrogen within giant star-forming regions. The blue color can be attributed to hot, young stars while the yellow color is from older stars.

Discovered by Charles Messier in 1773, M51 is located 31 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici. It has an apparent magnitude of 8.4 and can be spotted with a small telescope most easily during May. The Whirlpool Galaxy’s beautiful face-on view and closeness to Earth allow astronomers to study a classic spiral galaxy’s structure and star-forming processes."

01/14/2025

I processed this one with PixInsight & Affinity Photo 2. It is about 6 hours of 10 second exposures of collected data. Credit to YouTube video from Lukomatico on "OSC to Hubble". I somehow didn't actually capture the whole thing with mosaic mode, unfortunately.

What energizes the Heart Nebula? First, the large emission nebula dubbed IC 1805 looks, in whole, like a human heart. The nebula glows brightly in red light emitted by its most prominent element: hydrogen. The red glow and the larger shape are all powered by a small group of stars near the nebula's center. In the center of the Heart Nebula are young stars from the open star cluster Melotte 15 that are eroding away several picturesque dust pillars with their energetic light and winds. The open cluster of stars contains a few bright stars nearly 50 times the mass of our Sun, many dim stars only a fraction of the mass of our Sun, and an absent microquasar that was expelled millions of years ago. The Heart Nebula is located about 7,500 light years away toward the constellation of Cassiopeia.

01/09/2025

I processed this one from start to finish with PixInsight. It was my first manual "stacking" of 10 nights with my SeeStar smart telescope in "mosaic mode" of several hours each, resulting in 11.75 hours of 10 second exposures of collected data. Credit to YouTube videos from The Space Koala for the stacking, & to Cuiv the Lazy Geek for the processing.

The Pleiades are an asterism, or pattern of stars, as well as an open star cluster, made up of more than 1,000 stars.
They are located in the constellation Ta**us and are about 410 light-years from Earth.
Also known as the "Seven Sisters" and Messier 45, they derive their English name from Greek legend in which the stars represent the daughters of the ocean nymph Pleione.
As an open cluster, the stars in the Pleiades were all born around the same time from a gigantic cloud of gas and dust. The brightest stars in the formation glow a hot blue and formed within the last 100 million years. They are extremely luminous and will burn out quickly, with life spans of only a few hundred million years, much shorter than the billions of years our sun will enjoy.

12/31/2024

This is my first process with PixInsight, a powerful, paid astrophotography processing software.

Messier 27 (M27), also known as the Dumbbell Nebula, Diabolo Nebula or Apple Core Nebula, is a planetary nebula in Vulpecula (The Fox). It is large in size and quite bright, which makes it a popular object among amateur astronomers. It can be seen in binoculars and small telescopes. M27 lies at an approximate distance of 1,360 light years, or 417 parsecs, from Earth and has an apparent magnitude of 7.5.

This is my first process with PixInsight, a powerful, paid astrophotography processing software.

Messier 27 (M27), also known as the Dumbbell Nebula, Diabolo Nebula or Apple Core Nebula, is a planetary nebula in Vulpecula (The Fox). It is large in size and quite bright, which makes it a popular object among amateur astronomers. It can be seen in binoculars and small telescopes. M27 lies at an approximate distance of 1,360 light years, or 417 parsecs, from Earth and has an apparent magnitude of 7.5.

12/07/2024

The Ring Nebula & The Dumbell Nebula, taken with my SeeStar S50! More info on each pic.

09/25/2024

This is called a "mineral moon". The reddish-brown is iron oxide & the deep blue is titanium dioxide. This is the "super moon" (aka "moon in perigee", meaning it's at its closest to Earth) / (seasonal) "blue moon" (meaning 3rd full moon in an astronomical season with 4 full moons...a rare occurrence...the next one is 5/20/27) - the picture was taken with my Seestar camera telescope on 8/19/24.

07/29/2024

This is M13 (Messier 13), the Great Hercules cluster. It is one of the brightest and best known globular clusters in the northern sky. The cluster has an apparent magnitude of 5.8 and lies at a distance of 22,200 light years. A light-year is the distance light travels in one Earth year. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9 trillion km)! It has an estimated age of 11.65 billion years and contains about 300,000 stars. The estimated mass of the cluster is about half a million solar masses.
I took 108 10 second-long exposures with my SeeStar S50 camera telescope, & used Siril for preprocessing. 95 sub-frames were good, & stacked. I followed a tutorial for pre-processing. I then took it into Affinity Photo 2 to tweak color, sharpen, denoise & crop. It is the first processed image that I am happy with how it looks. I discovered while cropping that there is a galaxy there in the lower left near the corner!

05/20/2024

The sun from a few days ago, the moon from a few minutes ago, & the moon from a couple months ago.