I've Worked In A Chemistry Lab, They Had A Room With All The Analysis And Purification Equipment. There

This is the heart nebula (or at least as much of it as I can take with my setup without doing a mosaic) also known as IC 1805 or NGC 896. It is around 7 000 light years from us, in the constellation Cassiopeia. Despite its distance to us it still appears about twice as big as the moon in the sky, which speaks volumes when it comes to its actual size (about 200 light years in diameter).

This being an emission nebula its light mostly comes from gasses ionised by nearby stars.

This nebula also has an open cluster at it's center (a bit closer to us than the rest of the nebula), Melotte 15:

This cluster is bout 1,5 million years old which is very young for such a stellar object. It is composed a a few very heavy and bright stars and many fainter lighter stars.

The starless version :

(Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera and Baader 6.5nm narrowband filter. 25x300s for the Ha filter, 26x300s for the SII filter and 26x300s for the OIII filter, total imaging time 6h 25min, stacking and processing done in PixInsight. Photo taken mid-January) Other versions with a different colour combinations (a bit less pleased of how they turned out).

If you want to see the nebula in its entirety, you can check out this NASA Astronomy picture of the day made by Adam Jensen.

This is the Crescent nebula it is located in the constellation Cygnus. This nebula is the result of the center star first becoming a red supergiant and ejecting some of its outer layers of gas in space, that gas cloud was then shaped into a bubble by the stellar winds emitted by the central star when it later turned into a Wolf–Rayet star.

The resulting gas bubble is heated and ionised by both the UV rays edited by the start and the stellar winds causing it to glow. Wolf-Rayet stars are the final step of some of the most massive stars before they explode into supernovas. In the case of the crescent nebula, the central star is expected to go supernova within the next few hundred thousand years (We probably still have quite a bit of time left before we observe that).

When a star goes supernova, some of the matter that composed the star is blasted off into space at extremely high velocities (up to 10% of the speed of light). This matter will then slowly (few hundred to a few tens of thousand of years) slow-down and cool-down to for me vast clouds of interstellar dust and gas. This second photo is a part of such a gas cloud, the veil nebula (the center of the western veil, also known as C34). In short, this is the photo of what's left of the corpse of a star that exploded about 10 to 20 thousand years ago.

Here's another black and white picture taken in H-alpha, this time of the Pacman nebula (NGC 281). I don't have a lot to say about this one, it's a hydrogen gas cloud similar to the gas cloud around Sadr that I previously photographed. An interesting thing about it thought, is its position, it's about 6 500 light years from us and about 1000 light years above the galactic plane, making it a prominent target to study star formation. The cluster of stars at the center of the nebulas is a good example of those newly borne stars as it is only about 3.5 million years old.

Image of IC 405 aka the Flaming Star Nebula This is an emission (the red part) and reflection (the blue part) nebula. It's relatively bright for a nebula with visual magnitude of +6.

The bright star at the center of the blue reflection nebula is AE Aurigae, it's the star responsible for the ionisation of the gas in this nebula. AE Aurigae is what's known as a runaway star, those are star that moves at high speed compared to their surrounding environment. They are the result of gravitational interaction between stars or stars being ejected by nearby supernovae. In the case of AE Aurigae, it was probably ejected due to gravitational interaction, its path has been traced back to the Orion Nebula from which it was ejected about 2 million years ago.

The moon was nearly full and somewhat close by when I took the photos, so it was a bit tricky to process them. As a result, the reflection part of the nebula was not as visible as I would have liked but I think the overall result is not too bad.

Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera. 6x300s image for each colour filter (LRGB) and 12x300s for the Ha filter, total imaging time 3h, stacking and processing done in PixInsight.

Tried applying the Ortonglow script in PixInsight to give the nebula a bit more depth, but I don't like the halos it gave around the bright stars on the left.

II took another photo of M51 / the whirlpool galaxy, same camera and same processing of the data, but I used a different (bigger) telescope. Here, using a bigger telescope has two major effects, firstly the image is more ''zoomed in'' since the focal length is longer. Secondly, since the diameter is bigger the maximal (angular) resolution of the image can be increased. This increase in resolution is due to the way the waves of light are diffracted by the aperture of the optical instrument (in short bigger aperture = better resolution). This increase in resolution is one of the reasons professional telescopes have gigantic mirrors and/or use telescope arrays combined with interferometry to increase their maximal angular resolution.

This is a photo of the Andromeda galaxy I took nearly 5 years ago. The dark parts of the galaxy are gigantic clouds of dust and gas in which no stars and planets are born. This galaxy is one the closest one to our own, and yet it's 2.55 million light years from us, It's composed of about 1000 billion stars, in a few billion years it will collide with our own galaxy.

The two lighter blotches around Andromeda are two satellite Galaxys that orbit around Andromeda and are also composed of millions of stars.

Those numbers are so big they start to get inconceivable, and that's only a small fraction of what exists out-there. We are not much in the grand scheme of the universe, but when you look at the night sky and the wonders of the universe you can feel at least for a little while that you're part of it.

Photo of the NGC 2237, the Rosette nebula and the star cluster inside it, NGC 2244.

The star cluster, which is estimated to be about 5 million years old, is responsible for the ionisation of the surrounding gas. The mass of the nebula is estimated to be about 10 000 times the mass of our sun, which is relatively massive for a diffuse nebula.

This image uses a SHO palette, I quite like the colours I manage to get, both as the normal and starless images.

I also tried using the Foraxx palette, I think it's a bit less interesting visually, but the dark dust structures seam a bit more visible.

(Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera ZWO LRGB filters and Baader 6.5nm SHO filter. 5x120s image for each colour filter (RGB), 15x300s for the Ha filter 20x300s for the SII filter and 18x300s for the OIII filter, total imaging time 4h 25min, stacking and processing done in PixInsight.)

Finished working on my photo of the hors head.

Technically speaking the Horse Head is only the dark nebula, is bright hydrogen cloud behind it is known as IC434 and the second nebula (bottom left) is the flame nebula. The bright star in the center left is Zeta Orionis also known as Alnitak one of the three stars of Orion's Belt. IC434 primary ionisation source is the multiple star system Sigma Orionis (a bit above the frame), the hydrogen cloud being mostly ionise by the UV coming from those blue giant stars. The streaks visible in the nebulosity are mostly likely due to magnetic field within.

The Flame nebula's ionisation source is hidden behind it's dust cloud and is most likely part of a star cluster that Is only reviled using IR and X-ray imaging.

This photo appears mostly blue/teal wear-as most photos of this nebula are red(ish) this is because this nebula emits most of it's light in the H-alpha (656 nm) and S-II (around 672 nm) wavelength both of which are red, so in classic RGB images the nebula appears red. Initially I thought of doing an SHO image (were red is SII emission, green is H-alpha and blue is OIII) but this nebula lacks OIII emission (around 500 nm), so instead a used a modified SHH palette More precisely, I used SII for the red, a combination of both Ha and SII (0.8Ha + 0.2SII) for green and Ha for blue. The stars were taken separately in RGB and added back to the SHH image.

(Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera and Baader 6.5nm SHO filter. 5x120s image for each colour filter (RGB), 22x300s for the Ha filter and 32x300s for the SII filter, total imaging time 5h, stacking and processing done in PixInsight.)

I think one big reason why we don't consider the stars as important as before (not even pop-astrology anymore cares about the stars or the sky on itself, just the signs deprived of context) is because of light pollution.

For most of human history the sky looked between 1-3, 4 at most. And then all of a sudden with electrification it was gone (I'm lucky if I get 6 in my small city). The first time I saw the Milky Way fully as a kid was a spiritual experience, I was almost scared on how BRIGHT it was, it felt like someone was looking back at me. You don't get that at all with modern light pollution.

When most people talk about stargazing nowadays they think about watching about a couple of bright dots. The stars are really, really not like that. The unpolluted night sky is a festival of fireworks. There is nothing like it.

Since the weather has been cloudy and rainy for about a month now (not a single night where I could take decent photos), here is a photo of the sun from last summer.

Despite the sun just looking like a bright ball of light at first glance, there are actually quite a lot of things to see on it.

This photo was taken using a specific light filter that enhances the details of the sun's surface. All of those black spots are sunspots, regions of the sun that are colder due to local magnetic fields preventing some of the heat from reaching the surface. The slightly brighter regions visible on the side of the sun are solar plage, zones that are slightly hotter, also due to the local magnetic fields.

Finally, the surface of the sun in the picture looks a bit granular/wrought, that is due to solar granulation, smaller (around 1000 km in width) convection currents (basically bubble of plasma) at the surface. (The resolution isn't great so the granulation is not super clearly visible, unfortunately).