Amateur Astronomer Captures Jellyfish Nebula: astrophotography

This gorgeous image of the Jellyfish Nebula leads off our second installment of reader-contributed astrophotography.

Also known as IC443, the Jellyfish in the upper right of the image is about 5,000 light years away in the constellation Gemini. It is the remnant of a supernova that exploded around 30,000 light years ago.

This image was captured by Mel Martin with an SBIG STL-11000 astronomical camera and a Takahashi 5-inch refractor telescope, from his backyard observatory near Tucson. The image took three hours of total exposure, 2 hours through a hydrogen-alpha filter, and one hour of color data.

“What I find interesting in all these images are the subtle differences in star colors sprinkled around the field of view,” Martin wrote in an email to Wired.com. “Our eyes are attracted to the red hydrogen nebula, but the stars are really quite varied and pretty.”

Below, this view of the Whirlpool galaxy 23 million light years away was captured by Stem cell researcher Alexander Boiko from his backyard in Menlo Park, California with an SBIG STL-11000 astronomical camera and telescope