Astrophotobobcat

Astrophotobobcat Astrophotography from the rooftops of the city that never sleeps! All 📸 & 🎥are my own.
📍Queens,New York 🌆

09/09/2026

This star doesn't belong here. In 20,000 years, it'll be gone - and so will the flame.
This is IC 405 - the Flaming Star Nebula, in Auriga, about 1,500 light-years away. The blazing point at its heart is AE Aurigae, a massive, superheated star lighting up the surrounding hydrogen and carving smoke-like trails through carbon-rich dust.
It didn't form here. AE Aurigae was born in the Orion Nebula — the Trapezium Cluster — and roughly 2-3 million years ago, a violent near-collision between two binary star systems flung it out at over 100 kilometers per second. It's been running ever since, and it just happens to be passing through this cloud of gas right now.
That's the entire reason this nebula exists. A star from somewhere else, lighting up a cloud that was never its home, purely by accident of trajectory.

And it won't last. At its current speed, AE Aurigae will pass all the way through this gas in about 20,000 years — and when it does, the Flaming Star Nebula fades out entirely. What you're seeing is temporary. A flame lit by a passerby, burning only as long as it takes him to walk through.
32 hours of light, gathered from a rooftop in Queens.

My own data • Ha/OIII/SII


Everyone knows the three famous towers in this frame (upper right), but less is known about the one underneath. This is ...
09/09/2026

Everyone knows the three famous towers in this frame (upper right), but less is known about the one underneath.

This is the Spire — a pillar of cold gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula (M16), roughly 6,500-7,000 light-years away. Nearly 10 light-years tall, carved by the same radiation, from the same young cluster, as its far more famous neighbors.

Those neighbors are the Pillars of Creation — one of the most photographed structures in the sky. The Spire stands right next to them. Same nebula. Same story. A fraction of the attention.

It’s eroding exactly the way its famous siblings are — dense gas resisting the light that made it, possibly hiding new stars in the collapse.

Sometimes being remarkable isn’t enough. You also need the right neighbors.



Data via Telescope Live - link in the Bio.

This is the Spire. Same nebula, same violence, almost nobody talks about it.

There they are — the famous three, right there in the corner. This one’s been standing next to them the whole time.

09/08/2026

Something is hanging in this cloud. Look closely.

This is the heart of NGC 281 - the Pacman Nebula, in Cassiopeia — shot from my own rooftop with a 10” RC in HOSH: hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and Ha for structure.

A cluster of young, massive stars is doing all of this — carving the surrounding gas with radiation fierce enough to sculpt entire pillars, one of them pointing straight at a cluster of dark Bok globules.

Look at the shape of the largest one. If you squint, it’s not just a dark cloud. It’s a figure - arms out, hanging in the gas.
Inside that darkness, gravity may still be working
- dense enough, in places, to be collapsing toward a new star.

A nursery, carved by violence, holding a shape that shouldn’t be there.

My own data, captured from Queens, New York.

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09/07/2026

20-light-year column of dust. Being eaten alive by the star that made it possible.

This is IC 1396A — the Elephant's Trunk Nebula, in Cepheus, about 2,400 light-years away. What you're looking at, top to bottom, is a single dense pillar of gas and dust - over 20 light-years long - standing against the radiation of a massive star just off to the side, HD 206267, ionizing an entire 100 light years region around it.

Everything not dense enough to resist has already burned away. What's left is this: the toughest material in the cloud, still holding its shape, still eroding
And hidden inside it — completely invisible in ordinary light — are more than 50 young stars, some barely 100,000 years old. A few sit right at the edge, within a fraction of a light-year of the front that's destroying the cloud around them.

Being born and being erased, in the same place, at the same time.

Meteorites in our own solar system suggest the Sun was born in a cloud very much like this one - bombarded by a massive neighboring star, under exactly this kind of pressure.
This might be what our beginning looked like.

38 hours of light, gathered from my rooftop in Queens.

• My own data • Ha/OIII/SII

09/07/2026

This looks like a vampire’s castle in space.

At the base of Sh2-284 - a massive stellar nursery in Monoceros, 15,000 light-years away — one of the elephant-trunk pillars rises out of the gas like a fortress on a mountain, with what looks unmistakably like a spiral staircase winding up its side.

It's not stone. It's hydrogen, glowing red, standing against a backdrop of ionized oxygen — carved into this shape by radiation from Dolidze 25, a cluster of young, violent stars a few million years old, still clearing a cavity through the cloud around them.
The whole structure is light-years wide. The
"staircase" is a ridge of denser gas, resisting erosion just slightly longer than everything around it.

Sometimes physics builds something that looks like it was designed.

Data Via TelescopeLive

09/04/2026

One of the most powerful stars within 3,000 light-years is hiding in this frame. Good luck finding it.
This is NGC 7822 - the wider region around the two towers you've already seen — in Cepheus, about 2,900 light-years away.

The ridge on the left is the same story as the towers: dense gas being carved by radiation, an ionization front eating into a molecular cloud, elephant-trunk structures forming where the material resists.

And driving nearly all of it is a single star - BD+66°1673. Surface temperature: almost
45,000°C. Luminosity: 100,000 times our Sun. It's likely the most luminous star within 3,000 light-years of Earth, and its winds are carving the very structures you're looking at.

You will not be able to pick it out. Even professional astronomers describe it as "hard to find" among the thousands of stars crowding this field - a monster, hiding in plain sight, indistinguishable at a glance from every ordinary star around it.

This entire region spans roughly 150 light-years, and somewhere around 2,500 young stars are forming inside it right now.

One star doing more work than almost any other nearby. And you'd walk right past it.

Data via TelescopeLive - link in the Bio.


09/02/2026

Two towers. Both losing, slowly.

This is Gum 37 — a star-forming region deep in the southern Milky Way, where dense columns of gas stand against the same radiation that gave them shape.

They didn't choose this. The stars that lit them into being are the same stars now taking them apart — a slow erosion measured in tens of thousands of years, invisible from one moment to the next, but relentless.

And somewhere inside them, in the dark, something might still be forming. A star, quietly gathering itself out of the wreckage, racing to finish before the material around it disappears entirely.

Nobody knows which one wins. The tower, or the thing trying to be born inside it.

Two structures, drifting in the same field, keeping each other company in a very long goodbye.

Data via TelescopeLive - link in the Bio.


08/31/2026

A single star is doing this. It’s 200,000 times brighter than our Sun.

This is the heart of the Lagoon Nebula - Messier 8, about 4,000-5,000 light-years away in Sagittarius. What you’re looking at is the Hourglass: a bipolar structure carved by one star, Herschel 36, still bursting out of the cocoon of gas it was born in.

That star is blasting out ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds violent enough to carve ridges, cavities, and mountains of dust into the shape you see now - a monster still tearing free of its own birth cloud.

And it’s not just destruction. Hidden in this structure are proplyds — young stars wrapped in their own disks of planet-forming material, the same kind of objects first found in Orion - along with jets from stars actively still forming. Life and violence, in the same pocket of space, at the same time.

Data via .live - link in the Bio.

deepsky

08/29/2026

Astronomers spent 40 years arguing about what's at the center of this.

They still don't fully agree.

This is NGC 1360 - the Robin's Egg Nebula, in Fornax, about 1,500 light-years away. A planetary nebula: the final, brief exhale of a dying sun-like star, spanning roughly 3 light-years of pale blue-green gas.

At the center, something's been off since 1977.
Astronomers suspected the core wasn't one star, but two — locked in a binary. It took 40 years to actually confirm it, in 2017.

And it's stranger than expected. It's not a fast, tight pair like most known binary cores. This one orbits every 142 days — one of only a handful of long-period binaries ever found at the heart of a planetary nebula. It doesn't fit the models.
Scientists still aren't sure how it formed this way.

Even the shape is unfinished business - the nebula doesn't have a clean edge. It just fades into the dark, with dimmer patches and knots that don't line up the way they're supposed to.

A star that died leaving more questions than answers.

Data via TelescopeLive - Link in the Bio.

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