One of the things I love about night sky photography is it provides a seemingly endless outlet for my own curiosity.  Especially when using remote observatory data, its really easy to enjoy the night sky objects, without necessarily knowing where they are in space in relation to one another.  Case in point is this week’s images.

Two weeks ago I shared a wider image of the Gum Nebula, taken at 24mm.  After shooting that scene I decided I wanted a tighter scene, and I also wanted to see if I could get higher in altitude for a hopefully more complete view of the object.  After weeks of roads in the Smokies being closed, we finally got a break in the clouds, the bad road conditions, AND it happened to coincide with the right phase of the moon – what luck – so I headed up to Thomas Divide for the image above.  I setup and captured this image at 50mm, focusing on the right portion as viewed from here in Tennessee, and here’s the fun part.  When I got home I noticed the blue looking bubble towards the top of the frame and at 50mm could identify that this was the Dolphin Head Nebula (SH2-308)!  I had no idea that’s where it was located!  In any case, I’d previously processed an image of the Dolphin Head Nebula using Telescope.Live remove observatory data, which I’m sharing below in the Alternative Perspective section.

More next week!

–Dan Thompson