Mar 12, 2026

M42 is the closest massive star-forming region to Earth — a vast cloud of hydrogen and dust where new suns are being born right now. The four bright stars at its heart, the Trapezium, are infant stars only 300,000 years old whose ultraviolet light is carving the entire nebula out of a much darker molecular cloud behind it. Under Atacama's Bortle 1 skies, the wings of glowing gas stretched far past the bright core, with dark dust lanes weaving through the nebulosity. What we're seeing is the front face of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, a stellar nursery 24 light-years across that will keep producing stars for millions of years.

The Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud was resolved into a stunning web of filaments. This is the most active star-forming region in our galactic neighborhood — if it were as close as Orion, it would cast shadows.

Omega Centauri was absolutely breathtaking — the largest and brightest globular cluster in the Milky Way, resolved into a dazzling ball of millions of stars. At 10 million stars and possibly the remnant core of a dwarf galaxy, it's unlike any other cluster.

Jupiter was stunning through the telescope — the cloud bands were sharply defined across the planet's disk, with subtle color variations between the darker belts and brighter zones. The four Galilean moons — Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto — were visible as bright points flanking the giant planet like a miniature solar system.

M104 is one of the most photogenic galaxies in the entire sky — seen nearly edge-on, its prominent central bulge and razor-thin dust lane combine into a shape that looks like a Mexican sombrero against the dark of space. At its core sits a supermassive black hole with a mass of around a billion suns, one of the largest ever measured in a nearby galaxy. The Sombrero is also unusually rich in globular clusters — at least 1,200 of them swarm around it, compared to roughly 150 around the Milky Way.