We’re allowed to have favorites, right?  Well this is my favorite part of the night sky.  This is the portion of the Milky Way that captures most of the Ophiuchus constellation (the northern part of the Scorpius constellation in this case), in addition to the dark horse nebula.  I have been interested in this part of the Milky Way since I started shooting the sky a number of years ago – there’s just a lot going on here!

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that Zeta Ophiuchus, the big red structure in the upper right portion of the image, had really captured me this year.  Well, I wanted to share my explorations of it this week.  Below in the Alternative Perspectives are a few different views of it.  First is a 100mm image, which shows the structure in its entirety.  Second is zoomed in further at 300mm, and then third is 530mm.  That third image is special for a couple of reasons.  To capture this, I actually leased time on a telescope that sits in Western Australia (yes, that’s a thing) – my first time attempting this.  I was very pleased with the result!  The last image in that section is a picture of the blue horse head nebula (IC 4592).  This was also captured using the same telescope in Australia, but using Telescope Live data, which I processed.  In the image above, the blue horse head can be seen just down and right of the big red circle.

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this exploration as I have!  We’ll head back to day time next week!

–Dan Thompson