KernowCosmos

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KernowCosmos

Dedicated to capturing and sharing the wonders of deep space through the art of astrophotography.

Join me on this cosmic journey using images taken from our home in Cornwall, UK. More details can be found on my website…go take a quick look, link in bio.

29/05/2026

Swarm of Stars 🌟 - The Great Globular Cluster of Hercules

Possibly the last deep sky photograph of the season as we lose true darkness until mid August. These Globular clusters are extremely dense and very old stars. Imagine the night sky from a planet orbiting one of the stars deep in its heart. No deep sky photos for whomever might be there! 👽

18/05/2026

Windy Pinwheel…
M101 The Pinwheel Galaxy taken last week under conditions at the edge of what was possible. Windy with gusts of 20mph meant guiding and tracking where compromised, out of more that 2 hours of exposures I processed only an hour of reasonable images.

21 million light years from us, 1 trillion stars 🌟 and about 3 times the diameter of our own Milky Way 🌌.

05/05/2026

Taken from our back garden in Cornwall. The final image is definitely worth a close up on the individual galaxies.
Two panels each of around 2 hours exposure with the 900mm focal length f/4 reflector where used to create the final image.

29/04/2026

Something a little different, showing the Whirlpool Galaxy with its position at the far end of the Plough in Ursa Major.

21/04/2026

🌌 NGC 4725 — The One-Armed Spiral

Some galaxies look like they follow the rules… and then there’s NGC 4725.

Located around 40–50 million light-years away in Coma Berenices, this galaxy is a fascinating oddball in the Coma I Group. At first glance it’s a barred spiral—but look closer and you’ll see its most striking feature: a single dominant spiral arm.

That asymmetry is not just aesthetic—it’s a clue. NGC 4725 is thought to have been shaped by gravitational interactions with its nearby companion, NGC 4747, slowly distorting its disk and reshaping its structure over hundreds of millions of years.

Despite its unusual form, the galaxy still shows a bright central bulge and a faint inner ring, with its main arm hosting active regions of star formation—young stars, dust lanes, and the raw ingredients of future stellar generations.

NGC 4725 is a reminder that galaxies don’t always evolve symmetrically. Sometimes, the most interesting structures are the ones shaped by cosmic encounters—and a little gravitational disruption.

See more on my website.

3.5 hours of exposure
Astro cooled camera
900mm Focal Length Newtonian at f/4

13/04/2026

🌌 M106 – Beyond the Spiral

Captured from Cornwall under dark Atlantic skies, this is Messier 106, a galaxy around 24 million light-years away in Canes Venatici.

At first glance, it looks like a classic spiral… but look closer. This galaxy hides something extraordinary.

At its heart lies a supermassive black hole, actively feeding and blasting energy back into the galaxy. That energy carves out mysterious “anomalous arms”—structures you won’t see in most galaxies.

Even more incredible? Deep within the core, water molecules are amplifying microwaves like natural lasers, allowing astronomers to map the motion of gas orbiting the black hole with astonishing precision.

From a quiet Cornish night to a galaxy millions of light-years away… not bad for 2 hours under the stars.

📸 2 hours integration | 900mm | OSC
📍 Cornwall, UK

06/04/2026

A new image on my website, What a Hoot!

This is the Owl Nebula, a planetary nebula 2-3000 light years away. Our Sun will eventually go through the phase of throwing off its outer shell of gas as it goes from being a red giant to a white dwarf star, in a few billion years.

Nothing to do with Planets, just an old name when these looked disk-like through early telescopes.

This is around 3 hours taken last night in what I think might go down in my records as the worse winter for astrophotography in the 6 years I have been doing this.

21/03/2026

After months of Cornish cloud, the sky finally cleared 🌌

This is M82 — the Cigar Galaxy — about 12 million light-years away, captured at 900mm with my new f/4 reflector.

Those red plumes aren’t jets, but colossal outflows of glowing hydrogen gas from intense star formation — a galaxy literally blowing itself apart 🔥

Amazing what you can see from the edge of Cornwall on a clear night 🌊✨

30/01/2026

🏵️The Rosette Nebula🏵️

I put this together initially for my own interest using the single image I captured made up of 4 hours of data a week ago. I wanted to see the effects of processing that same set of data in two distinct ways.

Bottom right is the nebula processed so the normal Red/Green and Blue light is shown as it was captured by the camera, if you like this is the real colour image. The other three images use exactly the same captured image but given that I use a filter that only allows light emitted by Hydrogen and Oxygen to get to the camera and those elements produce Red and Greeny-Blue I can map them to specific colours. This mapping gives a false colour image which is intended to enhance and show structure in the object that would be difficult to see otherwise. The mapping of the elements to the colours produce what are known as Palettes, in the case of these images I am using an HOO palette, which means Hydrogen is mapped to Red and Oxygen is mapped to Green and Blue. The 3 different HOO images are down to my choices in how much of the Blue and Green are mixed.

As always, more on my website!

20/01/2026

A Cosmic Jellyfish over Cornish Seas

This wide field frame contains:-

• 💥 Stellar death (IC 443)
• 🌱 Stellar birth (NGC 2174)
• ⭐ Stellar maturity (M35)

This is essentially a time-lapse of stellar evolution, frozen across tens of millions of years.

🪼 Jellyfish Nebula — IC 443
• Type: Supernova remnant
• Distance: ~5,000 light-years
• Age: ~3,000–30,000 years (uncertain, but very young in cosmic terms)

IC 443 is the aftermath of a massive star that ended its life in a supernova explosion. What makes it especially interesting is that the shockwave is ploughing into surrounding molecular clouds, causing:
• Strong H-alpha and O III emission (perfect for the L-eXtreme)
• Complex, filamentary structures rather than a neat shell
• Triggered compression of nearby gas — death causing future birth

This interaction is why the nebula looks torn, rippled, and “alive”.

🐵 Monkey Head Nebula — NGC 2174
• Type: Emission nebula / star-forming region
• Distance: ~6,400 light-years

The Monkey Head is almost the opposite of the Jellyfish:
• A stellar nursery
• Powered by newly formed, hot O- and B-type stars
• Strong hydrogen emission, glowing where ultraviolet radiation excites the gas

Its presence near IC 443 is not just a line-of-sight coincidence — regions like this often exist in giant star-forming complexes, where multiple generations of stars overlap in time.

✨ Open star cluster — Messier 35 (M35)
• Type: Open cluster
• Distance: ~2,800 light-years
• Age: ~100 million years

M35 is the bright, resolved star cluster you’re seeing nearby. It represents:
• Stars that formed long ago
• Have survived their violent youth
• And are now drifting apart gravitationally

It’s a reminder that not all stars die dramatically — some simply age, scatter, and fade into the Galaxy.

Address

Hayle
TR27 5

Website

http://kernowcosmos.com/

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