Home Observatory: Background

After 11 years of visual astronomy, traveling to darker skies and hoping for good weather were yielding too few actual nights under the stars. It was time to build a home observatory: The Robservatory was born.

By far, the biggest challenge for amateur and professional astronomers worldwide is the rapid and relentless disappearance of dark skies as a result of light pollution. To counter this effect, the imaging of certain objects which transmit light at special frequencies (typically emission nebula, planetery nebula, and some galaxies) can be done through narrowband filters, which transmit light only at these very specific, narrow wavelengths, while blocking broaderband light from sources such as streetlights, house lights, and even the moon.

All images on this site have been captured at The Robservatory, located 12 miles west of Manhattan, under some of the worst light pollution on the planet.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

The Bubble Nebula: (Click to Enlarge)



Blown by the wind from a massive star, this interstellar apparition has a surprisingly familiar shape. Cataloged as NGC 7635, it is also known simply as The Bubble Nebula. The 10 light-year (60 trillion mile) diameter bubble offers evidence of violent processes at work. Above and right of the Bubble's center is a hot, O-type star, several 100,000 times more luminous and approximately 45 times more massive than the Sun. A fierce stellar wind and intense radiation from that star has blasted out the structure of glowing gas against denser material in a surrounding molecular cloud. The intriguing Bubble Nebula lies a mere 11,000 light-years away toward the constellation Cassiopeia (Text courtesy of NASA/APOD)
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Thursday, February 26, 2009

The Rosette Nebula (Click to enlarge)







The Rosette Nebula, also known as NGC 2244, spans about 50 light-years across, lies about 4,500 light-years away, and can be seen with a small telescope. Dark filaments of dust are silhouetted by luminous hydrogen gas.Visible are globules of dark dust and gas that are slowly being eroded away by the energetic light and winds by nearby massive stars. Left alone long enough, the molecular-cloud globules will likely form stars and planets. (Text source: NASA/APOD)
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