https://www.facebook.com/351555491385594/

Photon Receiver Astrophotography

Home
United States
Pittsburgh
Photon Receiver Astrophotography

Hello and welcome to the Photon Receiver family. My goal is to share the beauty of the cosmos above us one photo at a time.

Equipment:
Quattro 200p
Poseidon C-Pro
Ceres 462M
EQ6R-PRO
Raspberry pi 5 8gb running Stellarmate

04/25/2026

M106 sits about 23 million light years away in Canes Venatici, stretching roughly 135,000 light years across, and at first glance it looks like your standard spiral. Bright core, sweeping arms, everything where it should be. But then you look closer and realize this thing is not behaving normally.

Those faint extra arms are not just stars. They are gas being energized by activity from the supermassive black hole at the center. M106 is actively feeding, and it is pushing energy back into the galaxy, lighting up hydrogen in places that should not be glowing. So the subtle reddish and dusty structure you pulled out is not just star formation, it is the galaxy getting stirred from the inside out.

Then you start noticing everything else in the frame, and that is where it gets really cool.

NGC 4217 up top is a clean edge on spiral, around 60 million light years away. It looks like a thin blade of light cutting through space, with that bright central bulge and a perfectly flattened disk. Totally different orientation, totally different vibe, same basic physics.

NGC 4220 off to the left is another edge on system, but farther out, sitting way deeper in the background. It looks small and quiet, but that is an entire galaxy just casually sitting there minding its own business tens of millions of light years beyond M106.

NGC 4248 near M106 is part of the same general group, smaller and more subdued, almost like a satellite hanging around the bigger players. It does not scream for attention, but it helps tell the story that M106 is not alone out there.

NGC 4226 and those tiny background fuzzies scattered across the frame are even farther out. Some of those are hundreds of millions of light years away, meaning the light you captured started its journey before complex life even showed up on Earth.

What I love about this field is the color balance. You have that warm core in M106, subtle hints of hydrogen alpha regions, cooler tones in the outer arms, and then those neutral, slightly bluish edge on galaxies that are dominated more by starlight than active emission. It is not screaming neon like a nebula, it is quieter, more subtle, but it is just as real.

So this is not just a picture of one galaxy. This is depth. M106 in the foreground, its neighbors hanging nearby, and a whole background layer of galaxies stacked behind it at completely different distances.

03/11/2026

M81, also called Bodes Galaxy, and M82, the Cigar Galaxy, are a cosmic duo hanging out about 12 million light years away in Ursa Major. M81 is the calm, elegant spiral, about 90,000 light years across, classic grand design, stars neatly arranged in sweeping arms. It was discovered by Johann Elert Bode in 1774, and even through a small telescope you can see that it is serious business. Hundreds of billions of stars orbiting like clockwork.

M82, sitting right next to it, is the wild sibling, a starburst galaxy cranking out new stars like there is no tomorrow. Also discovered by Bode in the same year, M82 is smaller, around 37,000 light years across, but packed with furious stellar activity. The bright orange and reddish glow you often see comes from hydrogen alpha emission, newborn stars blasting their surroundings with radiation that excites the gas. Dust lanes streak through it like scars, evidence of past gravitational tussles with M81.

What makes these two amazing together is that they are talking to each other across millions of light years. M81s gravity is literally triggering M82s starburst, tearing clouds of gas and dust, sparking stellar fireworks. When you shoot them in H alpha or OIII, the images are not just pretty, they are a record of real physics, a snapshot of two galaxies interacting and shaping each other in real time.

Looking at M81 and M82 is like eavesdropping on a galactic conversation, one galaxy calm and orderly, the other loud and chaotic, yet each shaping the other. And all of that light traveled 12 million years just to hit your camera sensor. It is humbling, and it is beautiful.

01/22/2026

New year new Orion Image to show off how far I've come.

This whole region sits about 1,300 light years away in Orion and honestly feels unreal when you remember you are looking straight into a stellar nursery. M42, the Orion Nebula, is the main event. It is roughly 24 light years across and bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. It was first documented by Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc in 1610, and it is still one of the most studied objects in the sky for one simple reason. Stars are being born here right now.

M43 is basically M42’s quieter sibling. It is a smaller pocket of glowing gas split off by a dark lane of dust and lit up by a single massive star. It was cataloged separately by Charles Messier in 1769, but in reality it is part of the same massive cloud. Same factory, different room.

Then there is the Running Man Nebula, sitting just above M42 like it is mid stride through the chaos. It is not in Messier’s list, but it is physically connected to the same giant molecular cloud. Its blue glow comes mostly from reflected starlight rather than hydrogen emission, which is why it feels softer and colder compared to the deep reds below. That blue is dust scattering light, not gas screaming under radiation.

What gets me every time is the color logic. The reds in M42 and M43 are hydrogen alpha, hydrogen atoms getting blasted by ultraviolet light from newborn stars and glowing back at a very specific wavelength. That is not artistic license. That is physics doing its thing. The brighter and more violent the star formation, the louder the hydrogen glows. Meanwhile the blues in the Running Man are starlight bouncing off dust grains, like cosmic fog lit by headlights.

So when you look at this region, you are not just seeing something pretty. You are watching gravity collapse clouds, stars ignite, radiation tear cavities into space, and dust scatter the light like smoke in a spotlight. This is not ancient history. This is happening right now, 1,300 light years away, and somehow we get to witness it from a rock with oceans.

12/12/2025

New Andromeda edit! I really brought out the fainter details and seas of stars that lie in the outer rings.

11/29/2025

It’s been nothing but clouds for me lately, shutting down any chance of getting new data. Fortunately, my friend down in Louisiana, Bowen Vincent, had clear skies and captured this beautiful view of the Flame Nebula (NGC 2024) and Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33) using a 72mm refractor paired with a dual-narrowband filter.

He collected the raw data, and I processed and edited the final image. Absolutely stunning results from such a compact setup.

10/16/2025

This is M31 (the Andromeda Galaxy) a distant city of stars hanging 2.5 million light years away. So far away that its light began traveling toward us long before our species existed, yet so vast across the sky that it spans six times the width of the Moon. Anyone with clear dark skies can see it with the naked eye looming overhead, a silent and ancient smudge that most will never truly recognize for what it is.

A century ago, even astronomers believed this glow was part of our own Milky Way. Then, on the 6th of October 1923, Edwin Hubble turned his 100" telescope toward it and spent an entire night gathering its light onto a glass plate. When he later studied that fragile image, he found a single variable star within it (a flickering marker brightening and dimming with clockwork steadiness) and over countless more nights used its rhythm to measure the galaxy’s distance. He found it was too far away to belong to the Milky Way. In that moment, the universe grew beyond comprehension. Humanity then discovered that we were not the entirety of existence, but residents of just one galaxy among countless others drifting through space.

This photograph is my small continuation of that revelation.
Where Hubble needed a full night of exposure on film, I gathered just four hours of light with a dinner plate sized mirror and a modern camera in a quiet rural backyard. Technology has evolved, but the act is the same: catching ancient photons on a surface and asking them what they’ve seen.

Look closely at the image and notice the radiant core is home to a supermassive black hole wrapped in hundreds of billions of stars, spiraling endlessly into its pull. The dark streaks weaving through the disk are not shadows, but rivers of dust and gas where future suns will form. The faint haze stretching outward is a halo of stars still being born. Even the two smaller companions, M32 and M110, are bound to Andromeda in a slow, inevitable journey; in four billion years, they (along with our own Milky Way) will merge into something new.

This is not just a photograph. It is a moment of quiet contact with the past and the future at once. A reminder that the universe is not distant... it is ongoing, unfolding, and we are within it.

10/01/2025

IC 1848, the Soul Nebula, sits about 6,500 light years away in Cassiopeia and stretches roughly 100 light years across, but in my image it is basically one massive red cloud of ionized hydrogen. No fancy teal or gold tones here, hydrogen is doing all the talking and it is loud.

That deep red glow is H alpha, hydrogen atoms getting blasted by nearby young stars, losing electrons, and then releasing light at exactly 656.3 nanometers when they calm down. It is the signature color of star birth. So if the whole nebula is lighting up red, that means there is a ton of hydrogen being ionized, which also means there is a ton of star formation still going on.

That carved out cavity in the center is not a peaceful gap, it is a war zone. Baby stars were born there, immediately turned around, and blew away the cloud that made them like, “thanks for the womb, now move.”

IC 1848 in H alpha is not just pretty. It is the raw skeleton of creation glowing in one element that refuses to be subtle.

09/25/2025

Comparative data of the Orion nebula, 2024 vs 2025, highlighting differences in data processing. Notably, this data was captured using a used Nikon D5300 camera, acquired for approximately $250, upon becoming serious about this hobby. The ability I've gained to extract fainter dust details is crazy. Really goes to show how much I've learned over the past year. Unfortunately, the core appears overexposed due to the lack of shorter exposures during data capture. Hopefully, this year's data will surpass the previous results with the new, larger scope and improved camera. Hopefully clear skies are in the forecast for November through January.

09/04/2025

C33 (NGC 6992), the Eastern Veil Nebula in Cygnus, is a fragment of the supernova remnant left behind when a massive star exploded about 8,000 years ago. Sitting roughly 2,400 light years from Earth, its wispy filaments of gas stretch across ~35 light years of space.

What makes it stand out visually is the way different gases glow in distinct colors. The red tones come from hydrogen atoms being energized by the shockwave and releasing H-alpha light. The bluish-green filaments are mostly oxygen Oiii, which glows when stripped of electrons by the same violent blast. These tangled colors are basically a chemical fingerprint of the expanding debris cloud, showing us which elements were forged inside the star before it died.

The mix of reds, blues, and greens isn’t just pretty it’s the direct physics of atoms lighting up as they cool and recombine, a cosmic light show still echoing thousands of years after the explosion.

08/19/2025

Hard to believe these two images of M33 are only a year apart. The difference really highlights not just what better equipment can do, but also how much a year of processing experience matters. Same galaxy, same sky, but with refined technique and improved tools, the details and structure come through in a way I couldn’t achieve before. I’m pretty proud of how far I’ve come in just a year.

Address

Pittsburgh

Website

facebook.com

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Photon Receiver Astrophotography posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Photon Receiver Astrophotography:

Shortcuts

Want your business to be the top-listed Photography Service in Pittsburgh?