Astrophotobobcat

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

08/09/2026

The Running Chicken Nebula - and the tiny dark clouds hiding around it.

This is IC 2944, ~6,500 light-years away in Centaurus — a vast cloud of glowing hydrogen lit by a cluster of brilliant young stars.

But look closer. Scattered against the light are small, dark knots of dense dust — Thackeray’s Globules, first spotted in 1950. Each one is a cocoon of collapsing gas that might become a new star.

Might. Because the same young stars lighting this nebula are blasting the globules with radiation - eroding them, fragmenting them like lumps of butter on a hot pan. Some will collapse into new suns. Others will dissolve before they ever get the chance. Fragile, dark, full of potential - and running out of time.

Some of the most important things in the sky are the small dark ones you almost don’t notice.

For Boc-Boc 🧡🫒

Music by - Sound on. Drift through it.

Data via .live - remote skies, dark nights.
Link in the Bio.


08/08/2026

This looks like a black hole. It's something stranger.

That glowing blue ring isn't a void - it's a bubble blown by a dying star so violent it's tearing itself apart. A Wolf-Rayet star, one of the rarest and most extreme stars in existence, flinging its own outer layers into space at millions of miles per hour. What you're seeing is the shell.

And it doesn't drift alone.

Beside it: NGC 2014, the coral-red heart of the Cosmic Reef — a nursery where massive newborn stars are carving glowing caverns out of the gas that made them. Birth on one side, death on the other, floating together.

And none of it is in our galaxy. This is 160,000 light-years away, in the Large Magellanic Cloud - a separate galaxy, drifting beside our own.

Two stars at the opposite ends of life, in a galaxy that isn't ours.

Data via TelescopeLive


08/06/2026

It took an entire fleet of dying stars to blow this.

Meet Henize 70 — a bubble in space nearly 300 light-years across. Not carved by one star, but by dozens: the combined winds of giant stars and the shockwaves of their supernovae, all pushing outward together, inflating a single colossal shell.
And it isn’t even in our galaxy. This is 160,000 light-years away, drifting in the Large Magellanic Cloud - a whole separate galaxy from ours.

You’re descending into the center now, where the violence is fiercest. An entire generation of stars, living and dying at once, blowing a hole in the universe.

Data via .live - link in the Bio.

08/05/2026

A star’s last dance - alone.

This is the Butterfly Nebula: the death of a star much like our Sun, dying by itself in an empty stretch of sky.

There’s no nursery around it. No clouds to catch what it sheds, no next generation waiting to be born from it. Its light and dust will simply drift into the dark and thin into nothing. A solitary end.

And yet — it dies in the shape of a butterfly. The oldest symbol we have for rebirth, for transformation, for coming through. A dying star, alone in the void, making the most hopeful shape in the universe out of its own ending.

No rebirth is coming.

It became something beautiful anyway.

A speck of beauty in the dark🦋

Via .live • Butterfly Nebula (NGC
6302), Scorpius - Link in the Bio.

Music by - “Void Between Stars V4”


08/04/2026

Fly past the star that isn’t what it seems.
That blazing point up top is Alnitak - ~1,260 light-years away. It looks like it’s lighting the Horsehead... but it isn’t. The Horsehead sits ~115 light-years behind it, lit by a different star entirely.

Alnitak is just parked in our line of sight, closer to us, on the way.

Stay past it - because the frame is hiding things.

→ Look closely at Alnitak as you pass. It’s not one star. It’s a triple system, and its companion sits right on top of it (100 hours of narrowband to split that - no bloated RGB stars here).
→ Lower left, a tiny blue jewel drifts by: NGC 2023, a reflection nebula most people never notice.
→ And at the very end, the Flame ignites in the corner - glowing for reasons all its own.
One frame. Four objects. Most of us drift right past three of them.

My own data • 100 hours • 4-channel narrowband incl. H-beta.

Music by


deepskY

08/03/2026

There’s a star tearing this cloud apart - and almost no one has ever photographed it.

Meet RCW 105. It sits right next to the famous Dragons of Ara, so every telescope points at the neighbor and skips this one entirely. That bright knot near the center? A hot young star, carving the gas apart from the inside. Barely imaged.
Barely known.

The things you’ve never heard of are usually the ones worth looking at.

Data via .live • Link in the Bio.


08/02/2026

This tower didn’t form. It collapsed.

Meet RCW 75 — a dust pillar 6,500 light-years away in Centaurus, sitting in a region almost no one photographs.
Astronomers think this “elephant trunk” was imploded - crushed inward by the radiation of massive young stars nearby.

But the story doesn’t end in destruction. Along its edge, in the densest dust, a new generation of stars is being born. That glowing knot at the very tip. A candidate newborn star, lighting up the cloud that made it.

A pillar destroyed from the outside. New life igniting inside the wreckage. Both at once.

Data via .live - link in the Bio.


08/01/2026

These are ghosts with their arms up, and there's something being born inside them.

This is the Ghost Nebula, in Cepheus - about 1,200 light-years away and a little over two light-years across. Two figures, arms raised, standing in the dark. People have looked at this and seen the same thing for decades. It's also been called the Spooky Nebula, and the Ghosts of Cepheus.
But the name is the least interesting thing about it.

This isn't a cloud lit from outside. It's a Bok globule - one of the coldest, densest kinds of object in the galaxy. A knot of dust and frozen gas so tightly packed that light doesn't get through it. You're not seeing something glow.
You're seeing a shape stand in front of everything behind it, with only its edges catching light from the stars nearby.

And inside it, a star is being born right now.

Astronomers know because of what's coming out. Two cones of material are being fired in opposite directions from a point buried in the dust - a jet from a protostar we cannot see, shaped by its wind, its radiation, and the disk of matter swirling around it. Bok globules like this one usually produce not single stars but pairs.

Somewhere in there, a binary system is condensing out of the dark.

It sits at the edge of the Cepheus Flare, a molecular cloud complex spanning seven times the width of the full Moon.
So: a shape made of cold dust, named for the dead, with something alive inside it.

Data via TelescopeLive - Link in the Bio.

07/31/2026

The Running Chicken Nebula - and the surrounding region.

Astronomers are serious people who give things names like “IC 2944.” And then, sometimes, they look at a hundred-light-year cloud of burning hydrogen and say: that’s a chicken. Running.

But here’s the part worth your time. Scattered against all that glowing red are small, dark, opaque blots - Thackeray’s Globules, discovered in 1950. They’re dense clouds of dust and molecular gas, the kind of dark seed that new stars condense inside. The eggs of the chicken, floating in the fire.
Except these eggs are in a race. The same brilliant young stars lighting the nebula are blasting the globules with radiation, eroding them away - fragmenting them, as one observatory put it, like lumps of butter on a hot pan. They may collapse into new suns. Or they may dissolve before they get the chance.

Fragile, dark, full of potential - and running out of time.
Some of the most important things in the sky are the small dark ones you almost don’t notice.

For Boc-Boc 🧡🫒

Data via .live - link in the Bio.

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