Cosmic Pursuits

Basic astronomy and night sky information

Recent Astronomy Articles at Cosmic Pursuits

The Rosette Nebula

by Brian Ventrudo Filed Under: Deep Sky

The heart of the Rosette Nebula and the open cluster NGC 2244 that is emerging from it. Captured with a ZWO Seestar S50 telescope.

Look to the east of mighty Orion and you’ll see the constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn. While its stars are faint, Monoceros holds a small treasure chest of superb deep-sky sights for backyard stargazers. Perhaps the most striking is the Rosette Nebula, an achingly beautiful blossom of glowing gas and dust where new stars are forming.  The Rosette is an immense nebula, some three times larger than the Orion Nebula and three times farther away.  As you see in the image above, captured with a little ZWO smart telescope, the nebula overlaps the star cluster NGC 2244 which formed within the nebula and blown a bubble to give us a look inside. While can be a challenge to see the Rosette visually, even in large telescopes, the nebula is an excellent photographic target and the cluster offers a superb sight in binoculars or a telescope [Read more…] about The Rosette Nebula

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A Visit to the ZWO Factory and a Glimpse of the Future of Amateur Astronomy

by Brian Ventrudo Filed Under: Astronomy Equipment

Nico Carver visits the ZWO factory and offices in Suzhou, China and speaks with founder Sam Wen about the development of some of ZWO’s most innovative products. This short video offers a insightful glimpse into the process of conception, design, and development of successful new products – an art in itself. And it gives us a peek over the horizon of the direction of how compact, ‘smart’ imaging telescopes will influence the future of amateur astronomy. In my view, Sam Wen and his team have done more to get people involved with hands-on astronomy than anyone in the past two or three decades. They have done super work.

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Going Analog with the North America Nebula

by Brian Ventrudo Filed Under: Astronomy Images and Video, Stargazing

The region around the North America showing star clouds and Deneb (Alpha Cygni). Captured on Fujifilm Acros II film on a Pentax 67 medium format camera with a 400mm Takumar lens at f/5.6, 60 minutes tracked exposure. Image credit and copyright: James Cormier.

“These are the last days of the waning year;
High in the west now stands Deneb,
Great Star of the Cross…”
– Robert Burhnam Jr., Burnham’s Celestial Handbook, vol. 2.

An icy blast of cold and snow landed across the western Canadian prairies this week, but it wasn’t quite cold enough to keep me from having a long last look at the stars of northern summer now fading fast in the western sky. Scanning slowly with a pair of wide-field ‘constellation’ binoculars, I took in the stars of Lyra and Aquila, Delphinus and Sagitta, and the open star cluster IC 4665 near the asterism of Taurus Poniatowski that spells out a contradictory “HI” as it heads below the horizon until spring. But I reserved my final gaze of the evening for one of my favorite patches of sky near the star Deneb at the top of the Northern Cross and the adjacent glow of NGC 7000, the North America Nebula, about 3o to the east. [Read more…] about Going Analog with the North America Nebula

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A Visitor from Beyond: Comet 3I/ATLAS Rounds the Sun

by Brian Ventrudo Filed Under: Science, Solar System

A deep image of interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS captured by the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on Gemini South at Cerro Pachón in Chile, one half of the International Gemini Observatory. The image shows the comet’s broad coma — a cloud of gas and dust that forms around the comet’s icy nucleus as it gets closer to the Sun — and a tail spanning about 1/120th of a degree in the sky (where one degree is about the width of a pinky finger on an outstretched arm) and pointing away from the Sun. 3I/ATLAS is only the third confirmed interstellar visitor to our solar system. Image credit: Gemini South/NSF.

It’s a comet! No, it’s an alien spaceship! No, it’s probably just a comet. But Comet 3/I ATLAS isn’t just any comet. This speedy little visitor, which was discovered by the ATLAS survey telescope near Río Hurtado, Chile, on July 1, 2025, is only the third confirmed interstellar comet or asteroid ever observed in our cosmic neighborhood. It’s a free ‘sample delivery mission’ from another star system, and it may help reveal secrets and insights about the nature and composition of other stars and planets in the Milky Way [Read more…] about A Visitor from Beyond: Comet 3I/ATLAS Rounds the Sun

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The Pleasures of Ugly Astrophotography

by Brian Ventrudo Filed Under: Astronomy Images and Video

An untracked snapshot of the North America nebula taken with a ZWO ASI385MC camera and Nikon 28mm manual camera lens at f/2.8.

A thread on the astronomy forum Cloudy Nights a couple of years ago explored the possibility of capturing quick ‘snapshot’ astrophotos with small but sensitive monochrome cameras and inexpensive, small-aperture lenses of less than 25mm (!) aperture. Even better, this approach used no astronomy mount or tracking at all, just a fixed camera tripod and a PC to capture and stack each image over the course of a minute or two. Lightweight, cheap, simple.

It seemed like a preposterous idea. So of course I had to try it!

[Read more…] about The Pleasures of Ugly Astrophotography

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