Astrophotobobcat

Astrophotobobcat Astrophotography from the rooftops of the city that never sleeps! All 📸 & 🎥are my own.
📍Queens,New York 🌆

06/17/2026

The Elephant's Trunk Nebula - IC 1396A

No remote observatory this time.
This one's mine - caught from my rooftop in Queens, in a sky that drowns the stars.

Twenty light-years of cold dust and gas, coiled inside the vast glowing cloud of IC 1396 in Cepheus, about 2,400 light-years away. That bright rim isn't paint — it's the cloud's own surface being burned oft, ionized by HD 206267, a massive star just beside it pouring ultraviolet into the dark.
The trunk is being eaten alive.

And inside it, where the radiation can't reach yet, new stars are being born - some less than a hundred thousand years old, infants by the universe's clock. The same fire destroying the pillar is squeezing it hard enough to ignite the next generation. Creation and ruin in the same breath, and neither one notices the other.

Shot from my own rooftop in narrowband, processed in Pixinsight & Photoshop.


06/16/2026

The Fighting Dragons of Ara - NGC 6188
First I showed you the egg. Here are the dragons that guard it.

Four thousand light-years down in Ara, the Altar, two beasts of cold dust rear out of a dark molecular cloud and square off across a gulf of glowing gas — a wall of shadow nearly 600 light-years wide. They weren't sculpted by gentle hands. The hot young stars buried in the cluster above them, only a few million years old, are blasting them apart with ultraviolet light and stellar wind, carving every jaw and spine you see.

And the star-birth that lit this whole scene?

Triggered by the supernovae of the giants that came before — death seeding the next generation.

The dragons aren't fighting each other. They're losing, slowly, to the light.

This sits as far south as the egg - invisible from my Queens rooftop — so I pulled it from 's remote skies and gave it depth: a parallax drift that takes you between the jaws, the way it'd feel to fall through them in the dark.
The universe carves monsters out of dust and forgets it ever held the chisel. We just happened to look while the shapes still hold.

Data available TelescopeLive - discount's in my bio. Go reach down into the southern sky yourselt.

06/14/2026

The Dragon's Egg - NGC 6164

Buried in the southern constellation Norma, guarded by the Fighting Dragons of Ara, sits an egg of glowing gas about 4,000 light-years away - and the thing that laid it is a monster. At its heart burns a rare O-type star some 40 times the mass of the Sun, only a few million years old and already destined to die as a supernova. The symmetric shell around it isn't the soft exhale of a dying sun-like star — it's matter this giant flung off in violent outbursts, shaped into twin lobes by its own magnetic field, wrapped in a faint outer halo left by an even older eruption.

It wears the shape of a quiet planetary nebula. It is nothing of the kind.
This object sits too far south to ever clear my Queens rooftop - so I reached it through 's remote observatories and gave it depth: a parallax pass to let you drift past it in 3D, the way it'd feel if you were out there in the dark beside it.

The universe doesn't build these to be admired. It builds them, and forgets them. We just got lucky enough to look up in time.

* I'm partnered with Telescope Live - my special discount is in my bio. Go pull your own light out of the southern sky.

06/09/2026

IC 4685 — a forgotten nebula in Sagittarius.

It sits right beside the famous Lagoon Nebula, which is exactly why almost no one photographs it — everyone aims at the bright neighbor and scrolls past this one.

But look closer: that dark river snaking through the glow is Barnard 303, a string of cold dust knots blotting out the stars behind it, about 4,000 light-years away.
The overlooked things are usually the ones worth stopping for.

Processed from data • NYC
(subscribe code in bio)


06/05/2026

LDN 858 — a dark nebula in Cygnus.
This one's a little different from the glowing nebulae you usually see from me. The dark, winding shapes aren't gaps in space - they're dense clouds of cold dust thick enough to block the light of the stars behind them. Inside clouds like these is where new stars slowly take shape.
Processed in the Hubble palette (SHO), which maps the light of sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen into colors our eyes could never catch on their own.
Built from data in the Telescope Live archive, then processed here in New York.
Still amazes me that I can reach this deep into the sky from the city that never sleeps.
* (If you want to try it yourself, there's a subscribe code in my bio.)
What do you see in the dust?


05/25/2026

The dark shapes in the center of this nebula are stellar nurseries — collapsing clouds where new stars are being born right now.
NGC 281, the Pac-Man Nebula, ~9,500 light-years away in Cassiopeia. Captured with a GSO RC 10” from a rooftop in Queens.
Slow ancient light. Let it arrive.

05/21/2026

A new channel. A different way to experience the cosmos.
Real photographs of deep space - nebulae, star-forming regions, ancient light — captured from a rooftop in Queens and processed by me.
No narration. No tutorials. No rush. Just long, slow journeys through light that has been traveling for thousands of years to reach us.

Set to ambient music. Meant to be watched in the dark.

The first episode is live now. 14 minutes. 14 real photographs. One rooftop.
Slow Ancient Light. Let it arrive.

https://youtu.be/fl7DpAVPR3c?si=X2j6BUiTx7qHZ2En

05/03/2026

NGC 2392 — The Eskimo Nebula. A planetary nebula in Gemini, about 5,000 light-years from Earth. What you’re looking at is a star that was once similar to our Sun, now in the final act of its life - shedding its outer layers into space in concentric shells of ionized gas. The orange outer ring is the older, cooler material expelled thousands of years ago. The cyan-white core is the more recent, intensely energized inner shell, still being shaped by the dying star’s ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds.

Two shells. Two timescales. One star’s slow goodbye.
It’s called the Eskimo because early telescope observers thought it resembled a face surrounded by a fur parka hood. What it actually resembles is something far stranger — a star turning itself inside out, layer by layer, across millennia.

Data captured via

Processed by

01/03/2026

Space…

Heinze 70 Nebula, captured by .live by the telescope located in Chile, a total exposure time of 5 hours & 25 minutes, enough time to bring out some wonderful detail in this image.

For more details you can visit the link below, and if you’re interested subscribing, you can use the code BOBCAT at checkout, for 50% off any plans for 2 months:

https://tlive.click/bobcat

Center of Pac-Man Nebula (NGC 281), in the Constellation Cassiopeia, captured using my 10” GSO RC telescope, QHY268M mon...
12/31/2025

Center of Pac-Man Nebula (NGC 281), in the Constellation Cassiopeia, captured using my 10” GSO RC telescope, QHY268M monochrome camera, and Antlia 3nm Ha, OIII & SII narrowband filters, and color mapped Ha luminance, OIII red, Ha green & SII blue, for a bit of unorthodox color scheme, that brings up more the nebulously inside this beautiful target.

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