NGC6302 The Butterfly/Bug Nebula

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NGC6302, also numbered Sh2-6 and also called the Butterfly Nebula or the Bug Nebula, is a planetary nebula – the gases expelled from a low to intermediate mass (0.8 to 8 times the mass of the sun) red giant star before it becomes a white dwarf, lit up by that star. It’s located in the Milky Way, approximately 3360 light years away. It’s 2 arcminutes by 6.3 arcminutes in this image, making it approximately 2 by 6.2 light years across.

I find these small nebulae beautiful and fascinating. Each has its own unique structure.  The Butterfly/Bug Nebula is the archetype of the bipolar, pinched-waist or hourglass or butterfly shaped nebula.

Because of its interesting shape, the Butterfly/Bug Nebula has attracted a lot of research to understand how it developed. The current understanding is the following. The central star is obscured by a torus of dust around the “waist” of the nebula, but its initial mass is estimated to be 5 – 6 times the mass of the sun, which is on the heavy end of the range of stars that produce planetary nebula. The central star likely has an interacting close companion to produce the bipolar lobes. The star initially ejected a slow-moving torus of gas about 7500 – 5000 years ago. The star then ejected the faster-moving lobes starting about 2000 years ago, likely in a series of mass ejection events due to interactions with its interacting companion. Over time, the nebula will expand and fade, so we are getting to see it at a very exciting and dynamic point of its development.

I decided to image the Butterfly/Bug Nebula because it was a bright object that fit in well between two other nebula I was imaging.  It is small target for my 111 mm telescope, so I did not pick up as much detail as can be seen in images from larger telescopes.  However, it is quite bright, so it didn’t need a lot of imaging time.

The Butterfly/Bug Nebula is low to the south – at -37 degrees, 6 minutes declination – so the highest elevation it reaches from my driveway is 23.3 degrees.  And the view from my driveway towards the south is mostly blocked by trees and my house.  Even if I move the telescope to the front yard, the view is still mostly blocked by trees.  So I can only image objects in this direction for short periods of time.

The Butterfly/Bug Nebula is very bright, showing up in the single 15 second Red Green Blue (RGB) filter frames as well as the longer 10 minute Oxygen iii (Oiii) and Hydrogen alpha (Ha) filter frames.  In fact, it saturated the 600 second Oiii and Ha frames, so I reduced the time to 300 seconds.  Like with the Owl Nebula, the nebula was clearly visible in the RGB data, so I used the same technique, PixInsight’s CombineRGBandNarrowband script, to combine the RGB and Ha/Oiii data.

What do you think of this beautiful nebula?  Does it make you wonder, “Where did that come from?”  And do you think it looks like a bug or a butterfly?

For the record, I pick Butterfly!

Camera geek info:

  • William Optics Pleiades 111 telescope
  • ZWO 2” Electronic Filter Wheel
  • Antila HO and RGB filters
  • Blue Fireball 360° Camera Angle Adjuster/Rotator
  • ZWO ASI183MM-Pro-Mono camera
  • ZWO ASIAIR Plus
  • William Optics Uniguide 32MM F/3.75
  • ZWO ASI220MM-mini
  • iOptron CEM40
  • Friendswood, Texas Bortle 7-8 suburban skies

Frames:

  • June 23, 2026
    • 2 600 second Gain 150 Oiii lights
    • 30 0.2 second Gain 150 Oiii flats
  • June 24, 2026
    • 1 600 second Gain 150 Ha lights
    • 9 300 second Gain 150 Ha lights
    • 30 0.5 second Gain 150 Ha flats
  • August 29, 2026
    • 100 15 second Gain 150 Red lights
    • 30 0.02 second Gain 150 Red flats
    • 18 15 second Gain 150 Green lights
    • 30 0.01 second Gain 150 Green flats
    • 26 15 second Gain 150 Blue lights
    • 30 0.01 second Gain 150 Blue flats
  • August 29, 2026
    • 55 15 second Gain 150 Red lights
    • 30 0.02 second Gain 150 Red flats
    • 46 15 second Gain 150 Green lights
    • 30 0.01 second Gain 150 Green flats
    • 47 15 second Gain 150 Blue lights
    • 30 0.01 second Gain 150 Blue flats
  • September 19, 2026
    • 2 300 second Gain 150 Oiii lights
    • 30 0.2 second Gain 150 Oiii flats
  • September 22, 2026
    • 6 600 second Gain 150 Ha lights
    • 30 0.5 second Gain 150 Ha flats
  • 30 Flat Darks from library to match flat time
  • 30 Darks from library to match light time

Processing geek info:

  • PixInsight
  • BlurXterminator
  • NoiseXterminator
  • StarXTerminator
  • Generalized Hyperbolic Stretch

Orionids 2026: Antha 1, Camera 1

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Going back to my astrophotography roots … trying to catch meteors!  The sky was clear during the peak of the Orionid meteor shower this year, so I set up my camera on a tripod with an intervalometer and then sat with it to see how many meteors it and I could see.

I saw one bright red meteor over a 30+ minute time frame.

The camera saw one bright red meteor (the same one) over the same 30 minute time frame.

Not a terribly impressive meteor count, but I was delighted by the color.

This image also partially contains my favorite constellation – Orion; bright stars Betelgeuse, Rigel, and Sirius; and the Orion Nebula.  Can you spot them?  Seeing them in the night sky always makes my heart happy.

What makes your heart happy?

Camera geek info:

  • Canon EOS 60D in manual mode, 4 second exposure, ISO 800
  • Rokinon 14 mm f2.8 lens, manual focus
  • Intervalometer
  • Tripod

Frames:

  • October 22, 2026
    • 1 4 second light

Dell City Spire Star Trails

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One of the experiments I tried when we were recently in Dell City was to take a series of pictures that I could process to make a star trails picture.

I picked the spire of the adobe church where our very kind friends allow us to stay as my foreground focus and tried to point north so that the star trails would go around the spire.

Processing the sequence of images was surprisingly easy – calibrate, integrate using the maximum function instead of the average function, and then stretching and tweaking.

This is the first time I’ve tried to make this kind of picture, and I was quite pleased with the results!

Have you tried to create anything new recently?

Camera geek info:

  • Canon EOS 60D in manual mode, 59 second exposures, ISO 1600
  • Rokinon 14 mm f2.8 lens, manual focus
  • Intervalometer
  • Tripod

Frames:

  • October 10, 2026
    • 58 59 second lights
    • 32 0.0008 second flats
    • 51 0.0008 second dark flats
    • 35 59 second darks

10 October 2026 Dell City Fireball with Two Galaxies

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One of the things I love doing while running my telescope in Dell City is sitting outside and stargazing.  Under the glorious dark skies, I can clearly see the Milky Way – our own galaxy – and I’ve figured out how to spot the Andromeda Galaxy next to it.  While I was looking at the stars, an amazing – wow – brilliant brighter-than-the-planets fireball went overhead, split into at least three parts, and glowed green!  I had enough time to say “WOW!” but not enough time to pull my phone out of my pocket and try to photograph it.

As luck would have it, I was collecting a series of wide-angle images of the Milky Way Galaxy (the side to side bright “cloud”) and the Andromeda Galaxy (bright elliptical object above the Milky Way) over the spire of the church where our very kind friends allow us to stay, and two of the last five images in the sequence of 201 showed the fireball!  The first one shows it coming down from above.  The second one picks it up one second later and captures its train (ionized gas in the air the fireball passed through, in this image the faint line above the fireball) as well as its termination.

These images were processed in five parts: a single shot for the spire, the integration of 201 frames for the stars, the integration of the same 201 frames for the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies (processed separately from the stars), and single shots for the two fireball images.

For comparison, below are the original single frames for the meteor.  You can see that it was actually much brighter than the Milky Way or the Andromeda Galaxy.

What has made you say WOW recently?

Camera geek info:

  • Canon EOS 60D in manual mode, 9 second exposures, ISO 2000
  • Rokinon 14 mm f2.8 lens, manual focus
  • Intervalometer
  • Tripod

Frames:

  • October 10, 2026
    • 201 9 second lights
    • 32 0.0008 second flats
    • 51 0.0008 second dark flats
    • 35 9 second darks

August 2026 Lunar Eclipse with a SeeStar

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On August 27, 2026 a very deep (96.2%) partial lunar eclipse was visible from my driveway in Friendswood, Texas.

Since I had just used the SeeStar my amazing co-workers gave me as a retirement gift to make a video of the preceding total solar eclipse, I thought it would be fun to make a video of the matching lunar eclipse.

Solar eclipses have a paired lunar eclipse either two weeks before or two weeks after the solar eclipse (or sometimes both!).  The two week timing is because solar eclipses happen when the Moon is new and lunar eclipses happen when the Moon is full.  They occur together because the Moon’s orbit around the Earth is tilted relative to the Earth’s orbit around the sun, so the three bodies only “line up” when the Moon’s orbit crosses the Earth’s orbit, which happens twice a year.  There is a band of time around the time the Moon’s orbit crosses the Earth’s orbit where the three bodies come close enough to lining up that eclipses occur.  Depending on the timing of the crossing relative to the phase of the Moon, the lunar eclipse can be before the solar eclipse, after the solar eclipse, or both.

Developing clouds were predicted for the eclipse period, but the sky started out clear, and I was able to set up my SeeStar and get it focused on the Moon.  I started making a time lapse video and went back inside.  During the time lapse, several clouds drifted in front of the Moon; I cut those frames from the video.  When the max eclipse was about to occur, I went outside to have another look.  As I’ve seen before, the dynamic range of a camera does not match the dynamic range of the amazing human eye.  So the tiny sliver of sunlit Moon was visible in the images, but the remaining red Moon was not.  I adjusted the SeeStar exposure to try to better expose the darker part of the Moon.  As part of that, I tried to refocus the SeeStar, which was a mistake because I don’t think the focus was as good.  And at one point – oops – I way overexposed it.  Then the clouds rolled in, so I packed up the SeeStar and brought it back inside.

Near maximum eclipse, I texted several friends to make sure that they also got to go out and see it – living up to my motto “Find Wonder and Share It!”

Have you shared any wonder lately?

The Longmore-Tritton 5 (LoTr 5) Planetary Nebula

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Longmore-Tritton 5 (LoTr5) is a planetary nebula – the gases expelled from a low to intermediate mass (0.8 to 8 times the mass of the sun) red giant star before it becomes a white dwarf, lit up by that star.  It’s located in the Milky Way, approximately 1500 light years away, and is about 7.5 x 10 arcminutes in this image, making it approximately 3.3 x 4.4 light years across, which is big enough to be considered old as a planetary nebula. 

This planetary nebula contains (at least – there’s some evidence for a third) two stars – the white dwarf that is the source of the planetary nebula and a companion G-type star (same kind of star as our sun).  The two stars have a long orbital period, with one orbit taking approximately 2700 days.  The G-type star rotates about every 5.95 days and is barium rich, both of which may indicate that the G-type star is capturing the matter ejected by its companion into the planetary nebula.

I find these small nebulae beautiful and fascinating. Each has its own unique structure.  This one is spherical and appears to have two voids in it in both Oiii and Ha, similar to the Owl Nebula.   It does not appear to have a rim or ring. It does appear to have three brighter spots in Oiii evenly spaced around the outer edge.

Oiii data
Ha data

LoTr5 is quite dim, and wasn’t visible in the integrated Reg Green Blue (RGB) filter frames (30 minutes of total time in each) or in the single 10 minute Oxygen iii (Oiii) and Hydrogen alpha (Ha) filter frames.  However, when 5.8 hours of Oiii data and 8.7 hours of Ha data are integrated, the nebula is visible in both, although it was much brighter in Oiii than Ha.  I processed the Oiii and Ha data separately and then combined them with the RGB stars using PixInsight’s CombineRGBAndNarrowband script.  I mapped Ha to red and Oiii to blue and green with levels such that the Ha was visible and the Oiii was a light blue color.  

I wonder what it would have been like to be on a planet around the G-type star when the companion star became a red giant and then made a planetary nebula. What a weird change in the sky that would be (assuming the planet survived).

What do you think?

Camera geek info:

  • William Optics Pleiades 111 telescope
  • ZWO 2” Electronic Filter Wheel
  • Antila HO and RGB filters
  • Blue Fireball 360° Camera Angle Adjuster/Rotator
  • ZWO ASI183MM-Pro-Mono camera
  • ZWO ASiair Plus
  • William Optics Uniguide 32MM F/3.75
  • ZWO ASI220MM-mini
  • iOptron CEM40
  • Friendswood, Texas Bortle 7-8 suburban skies

Frames:

  • May 2, 2026
    • 88 20 second Gain 150 Red lights
    • 30 0.02 second Gain 150 Red flats
    • 89 20 second Gain 150 Green lights
    • 30 0.01 second Gain 150 Green flats
    • 89 20 second Gain 150 Blue lights
    • 30 0.01 second Gain 150 Blue flats
    • 17 600 second Gain 150 Oiii lights
    • 30 0.2 second Gain 150 Oiii flats
  • May 28, 2026
    • 18 600 second Gain 150 Oiii lights
    • 30 0.2 second Gain 150 Oiii flats
  • June 30, 2026
    • 18 600 second Gain 150 Ha lights
    • 30 0.5 second Gain 150 Ha flats
  • July 2, 2026
    • 15 600 second Gain 150 Ha lights
    • 30 0.5 second Gain 150 Ha flats
  • July 3, 2026
    • 16 600 second Gain 150 Ha lights
    • 30 0.5 second Gain 150 Ha flats
  • July 26, 2026
    • 3 600 second Gain 150 Ha lights
    • 30 0.5 second Gain 150 Ha flats
  • 30 Flat Darks from library to match flat time
  • 30 Darks from library to match light time

Processing geek info:

  • PixInsight
  • BlurXterminator
  • NoiseXterminator
  • StarXTerminator
  • Generalized Hyperbolic Stretch

Messier 97 Owl Planetary Nebula and Messier 108 Surfboard Galaxy

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Messier 97, the Owl Nebula, and Messier 108, the Surfboard Galaxy, are about 50 arc minutes apart in the sky, so they are often imaged together.  I think they make an interesting contrast, including needing different processing paths.  I collected data using both Red Green Blue (RGB) filters and narrowband Hydrogen alpha (Ha) and Oxygen iii (Oiii) filters, but how I combined the narrowband data and RGB data differed.

Messier 97, also called the Owl Nebula and numbered New General Catalogue (NGC) 3587, is a planetary nebula – the gases expelled from a low to intermediate mass (0.8 to 8 times the mass of the sun) red giant star before it becomes a white dwarf, lit up by that star.  It’s located in the Milky Way, approximately 2640 light years away, and including the outer Oiii halo is about 4 arcminutes across in this image, making it 3 light years across.  It’s estimated to be 8400 years old based on the expansion of the nebula.

The blue star in the center of the nebula is the white dwarf that is the remainder of the original star, which is estimated to be 5 billion years old and initially 1.5 to 2.5 times the mass of the sun before it created the planetary nebula and 0.58 to 0.62 times the mass of the sun after.

I find these small nebulae beautiful and fascinating. Each has its own unique structure.  This one is spherical and has an outer Oiii halo, an Ha ring, and an inner filled section that appears to have two voids, or eyes, in it. The voids appear to have a more complicated structure that looks somewhat like fingers, or, sticking to the face analogy, eyelashes.  Since there is no evidence for present-day stellar wind, the complex cavities may be relics from the time when the stellar wind was present.

M97 is bright enough that it showed up in the RGB filter data as well as in the narrowband Ha and Oiii data.  In the RGB data, the red Ha ring was clearly visible, and I wanted to show that in the final image as well as the much dimmer outer Oiii halo.  Because planetary nebulae are narrowband sources, the red I could see in the RGB data was from the Ha emissions and the blue/green I could see in the RGB data was from the Oiii emissions.  So I used PixInsight’s CombineRGBAndNarrowband script to combine the RGB and Ha/Oiii data together.  

Messier 108, the Surfboard Galaxy and numbered NGC 3556, is a member of the Ursa Major group of galaxies within the Virgo supercluster of galaxies, of which our own Milky Way galaxy is a member.  There’s a cool map of the Virgo supercluster here.  Sources vary on the distance to M108, with recent values of 27.6 million +/- 6.2 million light years away based on a 2022 paper using the Tully-Fisher method or 32.3 million light years away based on a 2018 paper using the redshift method.  In this image, it has an apparent visual size of 1 by 7 arcmin.  Its size depends on its distance as well as its visual size, so depending upon the distance, it is 8 by 53 thousand light years across or 9.4 by 66 thousand light years across.  Older measurements show it even further away, which would make it even bigger.  It is classed as a barred spiral galaxy, and it contains a supermassive black hole 24 million times the mass of our sun. 

Galaxies are wideband sources, so the narrowband Ha and Oiii data included light that was not from Ha or Oiii sources but just happened to be at that same wavelength.  So before I added the Ha and Oiii data to the galaxy, I used the NBColourMapper tool to perform continuum subtraction, where I used the original red and green data as a reference to remove the wideband signal from the Ha and Oiii data, respectively.  Then I used PixInsight’s CombineRGBAndNarrowband script to add the Ha and Oiii data to the RGB galaxy. The red Ha data is much more visible as the bright red spots in the final image.

In addition to M108, there are several background galaxies in this image.  I stretched them separately from the stars to bring them out as much as I could, but I’d really need more data to show them well.  

In this image, the stars and galaxies came from images using RGB filters (14 – 31 minutes per color), and the nebula and galaxy used additional images using 4.2 hours of Hydrogen alpha (mapped to red) and 3.5 hours of Oxygen iii (mapped to blue) filters.  The M97 Nebula, M108 galaxy, background galaxies, and stars were processed separately to maximally enhance each.

Camera geek info:

  • William Optics Pleiades 111 telescope
  • ZWO 2” Electronic Filter Wheel
  • Antila HO and RGB filters
  • Blue Fireball 360° Camera Angle Adjuster/Rotator
  • ZWO ASI183MM-Pro-Mono camera
  • ZWO ASiair Plus
  • William Optics Uniguide 32MM F/3.75
  • ZWO ASI220MM-mini
  • iOptron CEM40
  • Friendswood, Texas Bortle 7-8 suburban skies

Frames:

  • February 6, 2026
    • 3 600 second Gain 150 Oiii lights
    • 30 0.2 second Gain 150 Oiii flats
  • February 7, 2026
    • 4 600 second Gain 150 Ha lights
    • 30 0.5 second Gain 150 Ha flats
  • February 22, 2026
    • 94 20 second Gain 150 Red lights
    • 30 0.02 second Gain 150 Red flats
    • 43 20 second Gain 150 Green lights
    • 30 0.01 second Gain 150 Green flats
    • 65 20 second Gain 150 Blue lights
    • 30 0.01 second Gain 150 Blue flats
  • March 13, 2026
    • 2 600 second Gain 150 Oiii lights
    • 30 0.2 second Gain 150 Oiii flats
  • June 23, 2026
    • 10 600 second Gain 150 Oiii lights
    • 30 0.2 second Gain 150 Oiii flats
  • June 24, 2026
    • 14 600 second Gain 150 Ha lights
    • 30 0.5 second Gain 150 Ha flats
  • July 26, 2026
    • 7 600 second Gain 150 Ha lights
    • 30 0.5 second Gain 150 Ha flats
  • July 31, 2026
    • 10 600 second Gain 150 Oiii lights
    • 30 0.2 second Gain 150 Oiii flats
  • 30 Flat Darks from library to match flat time
  • 30 Darks from library to match light time

Processing geek info:

  • PixInsight
  • BlurXterminator
  • NoiseXterminator
  • StarXTerminator
  • NBColourMapper
  • Generalized Hyperbolic Stretch

Sharing the Total Solar Eclipse Wonder

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I really enjoy sharing cool astronomical events with friends and family, and I was very happy to share the recent total solar eclipse with my husband, my son, my daughter in law, her mother and brother, and her brother’s friends.

We watched the eclipse from the Autopia event at the Aerodromo de Siguenza outside of Siguenza, Spain, so there were other folks around as well.

We had been concerned about the potential for traffic between Madrid, where we were staying, and the eclipse site, so we got to Siguenza several hours early.  It was very hot, but the Autopia team gave us cold water on the way in to the site and had lots of drinks, and there were areas to sit in the shade under the trees beside the runway.  We had a great time hanging out, chatting, and playing games.  It was definitely more enjoyable to hang out with a group while we waited!

When it was time for the eclipse, I set up my SeeStar and GoPro in the line of photographers.  We had brought beach chairs for the group to sit on.

We had brought a colander from our Air B&B to use as a set of pinholes to project the partially eclipsed sun onto a surface. It took some adjustment to get it the right distance from the surface to have a good pinhole effect, but the experiment was successful and fun to show to other people.

I had brought eclipse glasses, and the event also provided some, so we had plenty.  It is truly cool to see the Moon start to move in front of the sun, and we had fun naming what the different shapes look like – cookie bite mode, banana mode, fingernail mode, fin mode.  It was interesting to hear what names the other people in the group came up with.  I had noticed in previous solar eclipses that it hits a point where you really feel like you can see the Moon as a sphere, and I had that sense again here.  

As totality neared, and it got darker and darker, it was fun to comment on what we were seeing.  When totality occurred, it was wonderful to express and hear others express amazement – seeing Venus, seeing the sun’s corona, seeing a pink prominence.  

My personal motto is “Find Wonder and Share It.”  This was definitely a shared wonder day.  

And it was definitely a better experience for being shared.

Have you shared any wonder recently?

One Eclipse, Four Cameras: Lessons Learned

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Now that I’ve processed data from four different devices from the total solar eclipse, here are my lessons learned:

SeeStar:

– For air travel to see an eclipse, I would absolutely take the SeeStar again; it worked great as a travel telescope.

– I was too conservative on when to take the solar filter off the SeeStar; I should have taken the solar filter off a little earlier to get the diamond ring/Bailey’s beads effects going into totality.  

– While it worked well to use time lapse mode with 2 second intervals approaching/after totality, I should have switched to video mode to get more frames per second just before/during/just after totality.  Or just used video for the whole thing, assuming there is enough memory space on the SeeStar.

– I should have adjusted the exposure differently for totality.  Looking at the images in PixInsight, I can see that the bright spots are overexposed, so the prominences lost their hot pink color.  

– There might be a way I could have programmed the timing of all that in advance so that all I had to do on the day was remove/attach the solar filter at the right times; I plan on investigating that before we do this again.

GoPro:

– I would absolutely take the GoPro again; it worked great to capture the wide field.

– I would set up the GoPro and be aware of where it was so I didn’t end up standing in front of it.

– I would have set the exposure to be brighter so that during totality the view was a little brighter.

Panasonic LUMIX and 12-60 mm lens:

– I would absolutely limit my lens choice again, and I would again choose the wide angle lens and let the SeeStar/telescope capture the close up view.

iPhone:

– As I did this time, I would limit my use of the iPhone to panoramic views.

What gear would you carry?

Which was your favorite?

Viewing the Total Solar Eclipse from Siguenza, Spain with an iPhone 16e

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Like almost everyone, I carry a cell phone everywhere, and I also used it to try to capture the eclipse.

I had a cell phone eclipse filter that came with the eclipse glasses, but I couldn’t really get it to work.

My favorite kind of cell phone photography is the pano shot, rotating myself around to get an extremely wide angle view.  I think the iPhone excels at that.  I took a pano shot showing the row of photographers to either side of me just before totality.

I took a pano shot during totality that also shows Venus above and to the left of the eclipsed sun.

I also took some pictures of the setting sun.  The pictures I got from the Panasonic LUMIX camera were better, but these were not bad.

What an amazing experience!  Pictures from four different cameras, all of them interesting in their own way, but none better than being there in person.

Do you have a favorite?

Camera geek info:

  • iPhone 16e Fusion camera 26 mm f/1.64