Mark's Astrophotography

Mark's Astrophotography Amateur Astronomer sitting in my Orange, Texas Backyard squirreling around the Universe!

07/29/2026

The Veil Nebula, 2,400 year old light falling down on my Orange, Texas backyard where I imaged it July, 2026.

The Veil Nebula – A Stellar Explosion Still Echoing Through SpaceThis delicate web of glowing gas is the Veil Nebula, th...
07/29/2026

The Veil Nebula – A Stellar Explosion Still Echoing Through Space

This delicate web of glowing gas is the Veil Nebula, the expanding remains of a massive star that ended its life in a supernova roughly 10,000 years ago. The explosion occurred about 2,400 light-years from my Orange, Texas backyard where I imaged this in the constellation Cygnus (The Swan).

What you're seeing is a single object, the shockwave from that ancient explosion plowing through interstellar gas at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. Those razor-thin filaments are only thin from our perspective—in reality, the entire Veil Nebula spans nearly 110 light-years from side to side. If you could see it with your eyes, it would appear about six times wider than the full Moon in the night sky!

I captured this over multiple nights in July, 2026 from my backyard in Orange, Texas, using a monochrome astronomy camera and three narrowband filters that isolate the light from different glowing elements:

🔴 Hydrogen (Ha)
🟠 Sulfur (Sii)
🔵 Oxygen (Oiii)

In total, I captured 549 individual exposures, each lasting 180 seconds—that's 27 hours and 45 minutes of raw imaging time.

Not every exposure was good enough to make the final image. After carefully measuring the sharpness, star shapes, and tracking quality of every frame, I rejected 235 of them and kept only the best 314 exposures, representing 15 hours and 42 minutes of data.

Those nearly sixteen hours of carefully selected light were then calibrated, aligned, stacked, and processed to reveal structures so faint that they're completely invisible to the naked eye.

Every thread, ripple, and glowing filament in this image is the lingering signature of a star that died long before recorded human history, its light finally arriving at my telescope after traveling for 2,400 years across space.

Captured from Orange, Texas
15 hours 42 minutes of integrated exposure
314 of 549 images used, 57% (235 rejected for quality)

Sometimes the most beautiful things in the night sky are the ghosts of stars that have been gone for ten thousand years.

So I did a thing. No longer an "Amateur" Astronomer!Bring it on, universe!
07/06/2026

So I did a thing. No longer an "Amateur" Astronomer!

Bring it on, universe!

Space Mexico - This is a crop of a larger target I imaged last year from my Orange, Texas backyard. This is the "Mexico...
06/30/2026

Space Mexico - This is a crop of a larger target I imaged last year from my Orange, Texas backyard. This is the "Mexico" of the North America Nebula.

You're looking at the edge of a massive star-forming cloud, about 2,600 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus (The Swan), where newborn stars are blasting the surrounding nebula with radiation, making the gas glow and sculpting the dust into cliffs, ridges, and dark smoky shapes.

If you could see it, this image would span 3 full moons! Known as the "Cygnus Wall", this wall is about 20 light years long.

Fun fact: A light year isn't a unit of time, it's the distance you would travel at the speed of light for a year, or 5.8 trillion miles.

I've gathered about 48 hours of data and picked out the best 15 hours to reprocess this image today, June 29, 2026.

Whatcha think?

Who can name this star? With it's apparent magnitude of -27, it's easily seen, especially during the day. It's also th...
06/28/2026

Who can name this star? With it's apparent magnitude of -27, it's easily seen, especially during the day. It's also the closest star to Earth at just 93 million miles or 8.3 light minutes. I imaged it today, June 28, 2026 from my Orange, Texas backyard around noon when it was directly overheard.

Beyond Imagination, but I did my best to capture it from my Orange, Texas backyard last night, June 27, 2026. This is t...
06/28/2026

Beyond Imagination, but I did my best to capture it from my Orange, Texas backyard last night, June 27, 2026.

This is the Sadr Region in Cygnus, a sprawling section of the summer Milky Way filled with glowing gas, newborn stars, and dark rivers of dust. At the heart of the area is Sadr, the bright star marking the chest of Cygnus the Swan. The Cygnus constellation forms a cross that's easily found in the Summer night.

I've imaged this region several times but in this attempt I slewed just a bit away from Sadr to capture some non-descript area just to see what was there. This entire image takes up just about as much sky as our full Moon. If I went to the left, right, up or down one frame over, there would be more of the same. In fact, I could go ten frames in any direction and it would still be amazing.

This stuff is really up there over our heads! Just look at how many stars, dark dust clouds, and gases lit up by star radiation so much they re-emit it's own light in different colors are in this one small area.

I'm constantly posting colorful images and I imagine the first impression many of you form is 'Oooo, pretty', but when you stop and think about it, it's much more than that. This is the universe around us that is part of our existence.

Step outside one clear night and look up. If you could capture that night sky one full moon's area at a time, it would take 100,000 images just like this to see it all! Six months later, do the same thing and it would take ANOTHER 100,000 full moon sized images to see that side of our sky! And if that weren't enough to drop your jaw, I'm just talking about the northern hemisphere. The southern hemisphere, say from Australia, is even more intense!

If you truly think about it, you may feel small and insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe. DON'T! Instead, consider how important we are in that we can visualize, consider, understand, and describe something so mind-bendingly larger than us.

Thanks for reading.

Horsehead Nebula - November, 2025This is my November image of the Horsehead Nebula, one of the most recognizable objects...
06/27/2026

Horsehead Nebula - November, 2025

This is my November image of the Horsehead Nebula, one of the most recognizable objects in the winter night sky. I finally got around to processing my data 7 months after the several nights I spent in my Orange, Texas backyard last winter.

It sits in the constellation Orion, just below the leftmost star in Orion’s Belt (That bright star blazing on the left side of the image, Alnitak), and right beside it is the glowing Flame Nebula. The little “horse head” shape near the center is not glowing itself — it is a dark cloud of dust and gas blocking the light from the bright hydrogen nebula behind it.

The Horsehead is roughly 1,300 light-years away, meaning the light I captured left that region around the time Europe was still in the early Middle Ages. The actual Horsehead structure is several light-years tall, but in our sky it is tiny — only a fraction of the width of the full Moon. You could stack 5 Horsehead's to equal it's diameter.

What I love about this one besides it's uniqueness is that it sits so close to a star that is unmistakable in our sky. Even though it's the 31st brightest star in my southeast Texas sky, it's not the reason for all this bright nebulosity. Look above the Horsehead and you'll see another bright star. That's Sigma Orionis and it's actually a 5 star system! 5 stars orbiting each other!

This image is a compilation of several nights imaging and about 30 hours of data that I sifted through and used the best 6.

I image this one every year and I think this is the best yet. 'd love to hear what you think!

The Lion Nebula - October 2025Here’s my latest image of Sh 2-132, better known as the Lion Nebula. I spent 3 hours on th...
06/21/2026

The Lion Nebula - October 2025

Here’s my latest image of Sh 2-132, better known as the Lion Nebula. I spent 3 hours on this target last year but never got around to processing it.

It’s a large emission nebula located in the constellation Cepheus, roughly 10,000 light-years away from my Orange, Texas backyard where I imaged it. It's so far away, it's in the next over arm of our Milky Way galaxy. Even though it's so far away, it appears 2 1/2 times larger than our full moon in our night sky!

This huge cloud of gas and dust is being energized by massive hot stars buried in and around the nebula. Their radiation causes the surrounding gas to glow, especially hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur. In this image, those gases show up as the pinks, purples, golds, and darker smoky structures spread across the frame.

The nickname “Lion Nebula” comes from the overall shape of the cloud. With a little imagination, you can see a lion-like form in the brighter central region and surrounding wisps — although, like most nebula nicknames, astronomy requires just the right balance of science, imagination, and squinting.

Here's my full frame and a few zooms into areas I think are cool.

Another reminder that even from Southeast Texas, there’s a whole universe hiding overhead.

The Eagle Nebula - June 2026. About 6,000 light years away from my Orange, Texas backyard sits an iconic summer astrono...
06/18/2026

The Eagle Nebula - June 2026.

About 6,000 light years away from my Orange, Texas backyard sits an iconic summer astronomical wonder. In 1745, Swiss astronomer Jean-Phillipe de Cheseaux named it the Eagle Nebula due to the shadowy silhouette of what looks like an eagle in flight in the heart of a massive 70 light year wide hydrogen emission nebula (cloud).

If you could see it in the night sky, it would appear as large as the full moon. In a very dark sky, it would barely be visible to the naked eye. From my backyard, not a chance.

The nebula is lit up by the cluster of super hot stars in it's center. Light from these stars irradiate the gas which then releases photons of specific colors.

The "Eagle" is actually 3 towers of dust 5 light years tall that obscure the light behind them. Within the towers are protostars that will eventually shine through the dust. In about 100,000 years the pillars will have been blown away by the energy of these new stars. That's why these structures are also known as the "Pillars of Creation".

I gathered over 40 hours of data over several nights to generate this image. Out of the 1,000 subframes I collected (1/4 of a terabyte of data), I used the best 450. I cropped it in to match the same field of view as the Hubble Space Telescope image, just for comparison.

The Eagle rising in our night sky heralds the beginning of the Summer season of astronomy, when our night sky faces the center of our Milky Way Galaxy.

Whatcha think? I don't compare to Hubble, but... All I had to do was go out in my backyard.

Eagle Rising - June 11, 2026. Summer targets are back! Last night was my first session this season on the Eagle Nebula...
06/11/2026

Eagle Rising - June 11, 2026. Summer targets are back! Last night was my first session this season on the Eagle Nebula. Here's one hour from the lawn chair in my Orange, Texas backyard compared to what Nasa took back in 2014 using their $16 billion orbiting Hubble Telescope.

Theirs looks a little better, but then again, my equipment doesn't have a $450 million per year budget!.

This stuff is right over our heads! So cool.

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