Dan Sullivan Photography

12/04/2025

16 hours of integration on IC 1396A in narrowband. Some folks say they see a woman in the dark dust, others say it looks exactly like an elephant lifting its trunk. What do you see?

One of the coolest things about this region is that the entire pillar is being slowly sculpted by radiation from a massive young star nearby, eating away at the gas and triggering new stars to form inside.

06/08/2025

After 22+ hours of integration over 5 nights, this beauty finally revealed itself — the Cocoon Nebula (IC 5146), a stellar nursery 4,000 light-years away in Cygnus.

Fun fact: while it looks peaceful, the bright star at its center was just born and is busy clearing out a bubble in the surrounding gas and dust, shaping this cosmic cocoon.

04/04/2025

A recent capture of the Crescent Nebula floating in the rich starfields of Cygnus.

🔭 This glowing cosmic bubble is the result of a massive star shedding its outer layers in powerful stellar winds, creating shockwaves in the surrounding gas.

💡 It spans about 25 light-years across and lies roughly 5,000 light-years from Earth. If it were visible to the naked eye, it would appear just over half the size of the full Moon in the night sky. 


04/04/2025

04/11/2024

Those red flames are Solar prominences- large plasma and magnetic fields structures extending outward from the suns surface. During totality you could see them with your naked eyes!!!

04/09/2024

Beautiful, clear skies in Orleans, VT made for a spectacular solar eclipse. Nothing I read or watched prepared me for how surreal and significant it felt to watch the moon cover the sun for a few minutes.

                 

10/19/2023

M27, the Dumbbell Nebula

M27 is what happens when a dying star, much like our Sun in a few billion years, decides to go out in style. It sheds its outer layers, creating this breathtaking spectacle.

🔭 This is about 20 hours of narrowband exposure, enough to resolve the outer “wings,” which can be quite tricky to capture. I also took a set of broadband (RGB) exposures for the stars and integrated them to show their true colors.�

12/01/2022

A few shots from November’s total lunar eclipse as seen from Connecticut. This time I tried a mix of both close up and wide field. It was fun scoping out the best location to line up the Heublien Tower, and always a surreal experience to witness in person. I also experimented in Photoshop to create with a wide field composite showing the different phases over about 1.5 hours (first pic), and tried a rudimentary stacking technique (also in Photoshop) to combine 15 photos to bring out more detail in the close up shot of the moon (second pic).

👨‍🔬Interesting fact: the “Blood” moon’s deep red color is caused by phenomenon called “Rayleigh scattering.” We see this effect in the reddening of the sunlight during sunrise and sunset. During the eclipse, the Earth blocks the Sun’s rays from hitting the moon, except for the very edges, where sunsets and sunrises are occurring. The red color you see is literally all the sunrises and sunsets on Earth reflected back at us from the surface of the moon 🤯

05/11/2022

M81– Bode’s Galaxy, and M82– The Cigar Galaxy are a pair of galaxies in the constellation Ursa Major, just off the “dipper” part of the Big Dipper.

Bode’s Galaxy’s center contains a supermassive black hole that’s about 15 times the mass of the black hole in the Milky Way Galaxy. The entire object appears roughly the same size as a full moon in the night sky, just much much dimmer.

The Cigar Galaxy is forming stars 10x faster than normal galaxies, which makes it five times more luminous than the whole Milky Way and has a center one hundred times more luminous than our galaxy's center.

Until now, all of my astro photographs have been taken using a telephoto camera lens (Sigma 150-600mm). It’s an awesome lens, but it’s really meant for short daytime exposures (think wildlife or sports photography), not long nighttime exposures.

This spring, I finally took the plunge and bought a proper telescope designed specifically for astrophotography 🔭 (Skywatcher Esprit 120) and I’m completely blown away at the difference it makes 🤯. I knew I was sacrificing some image clarity by using a camera lens but I’m awestruck at the difference in detail the telescope is able to resolve in comparison.

———————————
📸Gear:
ASI1600mm Pro
Skywatcher Esprit 120
Astronomik LRGB Filter Set
ZWO EFW
ASI290 Guide Camera
Orion 50mm Guidescope
iOptron CEM60 Mount
———————————
📍Acquisition:
4/15 - 4/17, 2021
Killingworth, CT
Bortle 4 (Green Zone)
Total exposure 18 hours
———————————
👨‍💻Processing
Pixinsight
Photoshop
———————————

03/08/2022

20+ Hours of exposure time for the Elephant Nebula