Happy Easter everyone!  Admittedly, this week’s Picture of the Week doesn’t have anything to do with Easter (except in the Psalm 19:1 sense) – maybe the colors?  The nebulae kind of look like Easter eggs?  No?  Well okay then.  🙂

As I have been on my astrophotography journey, different night sky objects tend to catch my eye, which makes me want to look a bit more, as I’ve mentioned in the past couple of weeks.  This week’s Picture of the Week teases this out a bit more.  The above image of the outer portion of the Scorpio constellation always fascinates me when I see it show up in my images, so last summer I decided to just take a picture of it all by itself.  I did not, however, take good notes, so I can’t remember if this was 50mm or 100mm, but I think the latter.  Anyway, after looking at this image I became further fascinated by the lower right-most star and its nebula.  It’s scientific name is SH2-1, and if you scroll on down to the Alternative Perspective section, you can see an image of it by itself, thanks to data I put together from Telescope Live.  This area of the sky is just so colorful and beautiful – incredible really!

More next week!

–Dan Thompson