Wait, wait!  Do not adjust your screen – you are not seeing things and are not hallucinating (at least I hope not)!  So what the heck is that!? Is the world ending?  Well, I’m glad you asked. 🙂  What you’re seeing is the Rosette Nebula, rising behind Cerulean Knob, and welcome to my new series of skyscapes, where I am focusing on deep space objects.

For those of you who have followed along with my work last year, you likely noticed (and hopefully remember) that I was toying around with the idea of shooting the Milky Way at tighter and tighter focal lengths.  If you subscribe to my blog as a feed, you will have seen an article I wrote where I illustrate the various focal lengths I tried.  Well this winter I have taken that a leap forward, by not only shooting with an even longer lens (300mm), but also by trying to tackle deep space objects.

I have always admired deep space photography, and have even dabbled in it slightly in the past with my attempts at photographing the Orion nebula.  What has always struck me about deep space photography though, is while the images are beautiful, the viewer is left without much context.  What I’m hoping to do with this series is add a bit of that context for you, with the goal of you leaving with a greater appreciation for these objects and our night sky.  So with that as a setup, let’s dive into what in the world – or out of this world – that you’re looking at.

First and foremost, all the images in this series are to scale and astronomically accurate.  I’ll explain in a future post how I’m doing this, but for now, just know that the images are all to scale.  So for further context, if the moon were also in this picture at this focal length, it would easily fit within the “hole” in the center of the nebula. Absolutely huge.  As I mentioned above, the name of this specific nebula is the Rosette nebula (feel free to Google image search that name!) and then the red you’re seeing in the upper left corner is part of a neighboring nebula known as the Cone nebula.  An interesting point is that this nebula sits about 5,000 light years away from earth, which literally means that what I’ve photographed here happened over 5,000 years ago.  So around the time of the first Egyptian Pharaoh and when the first iteration of Stonehenge was built, the light you’re seeing in the sky left it source and found its way to my camera.  Kinda crazy, right?  I’m still trying to wrap my head around it too really.

Now, you may be thinking, “well that’s all well and good Dan, but what is it?”  I’ll answer that, next week!

–Dan Thompson