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Jeff Lesperance

@astrojeff_

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Astrophotographer, chemist, nerd
○ CofC Astrophysics '28
○ Print my portfolio👇

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Space has a giant heart!

The heart nebula, or less creatively Sh-2 190, is a giant emission nebula, located about 7,500 light years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia.

The nebula, like most emission nebulae, glows the distinct red color of hydrogen-alpha light, caused by the hydrogen in the nebula being energized by the central star cluster, Melotte 15. Besides just hydrogen though, this nebula is also full of ionized oxygen, which I also captured in this HOO photo, where hydrogen is red and oxygen is a teal blue.

Just above the heart nebula is a small ring, named WeBo 1. This rarely (at least deliberately) photographed object was discovered in 2002 by Bond et al, and is a planetary nebula - a less violent stellar death than a supernova, which happens to lower-mass stars like our Sun. The star this nebula came from is classified as a Ba ii (barium-2) star - cool, full of barium and strontium, and old. The star takes about 4-5 days to rotate once, and is weakly variable. The nebula is about 5,000 light years away, or about a third closer to us than the heart nebula is.

Askar FRA 400
ZWO ASI6200MM
Optolong 3nm Ha, Oiii
Shot from Starfront Remote Observatories

20x6m Ha
20x6m Oiii
= 4h total (HOO)
Stacked and processed in Pixinsight

#astrophotography #nebula #ic1805 #emissionnebula #science #astronomy #space #stars #starfront taken in Rockwood, Texas by @astrojeff_

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a year ago

Hi fellow nerds!

Somehow, my latest reel has pleased the instagram gods, so now there's over 1,000 new followers here! Pleasure to meet you all!

I figured I'd introduce myself, and what I do: take pretty photos of space with my telescopes :)

#space #astronomycommunity #astrophotography #stars #astrophotography by @astrojeff_

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16 days ago

Your eyes suck. Here's why:

Our eyes are tiny, record very little light that actually enters our eye in the first place, and we can't "integrate" light over time. All of this means that we can't see faint things very well at all, and seeing color in faint things is practically impossible. That's why whenever you've tried looking at a nebula through the eyepiece of your telescope, you saw a grey smudge at best. Almost any space photos you've ever seen wouldn't look like that to the naked eye.

Cameras, on the other hand, are FAR superior to the human eye. Nowadays they can record >90% of all the light that comes in, and can do it for hours. That allows the camera to record plenty of light from a given nebula, allowing its structure and true color to be revealed. This allows even your own DSLR camera to detect the faintest colors and structures of nebulae millions of times fainter than the human eye limit!

If you're able, buy a telescope and camera, point them at the sky, and start taking photos. You won't regret it ✨️🔭📷

#astrophotography #space #nebula #longexposure #photography by @astrojeff_

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24 days ago

vdb 14 (bottom left) and vdb 15 (top right) are two reflection nebulae in the constellation Camelopardalis, part of the Camelopardalis OB1 group. About 3,000 light years from Earth, Cam OB1 is a group of OB stars: young, short-lived, and several times hotter than the Sun. Cam OB1 sits on the edge of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way, the minor arm that our Sun is in.

The two stars that illuminate the components: CE Cam and CS Cam, are nearly identical blue supergiant stars. They’re each only about 10-15 million years old, and in that short time have already fused all the hydrogen in their cores, and is now fusing heavier atoms together as it moves further away from the Main Sequence that stars like our Sun are currently on.

Both stars are already in very old age, as high-mass stars go. Blue supergiants consume their fuel very fast, so they only have a few million years left before all that fuel runs out, and they collapse into core-collapse supernovae.

Askar FRA400
ZWO ASI6200MM
Optolong 2" RGB filters
27x5m each = 6h 45m total (RGB)

Photographed from Starfront Remote Observatories

#astrophotography #space #nebula #longexposure #photography by @astrojeff_

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3 days ago

SpaceX rocket launch from Greenwood, SC!

Canon EOS Ra
Canon 18-55mm lens
2/5s single shots

#spacex #rocket #shotoncanon #nightskyphotography #launch taken in Greenwood, South Carolina by @astrojeff_

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5 days ago

Rare Jupiter-Moon occultation this morning!

At about 5am EDT this morning, Jupiter poked back out from behind the moon, in what's called the "emersion" stage of an "occultation". Occultations are when one object, in this case the Moon, passes in front of another object, in this case Jupiter, completely blocking it.

The Moon initially blocked the moon about an hour before this, but that moment was sadly below the horizon from my remote scope's location, so I wasn't able to capture it, only emersion. Still, seeing Jupiter's moons pop out one after the other (in order: Europa, Callisto, Io, Jupiter, then Ganymede) in the moments leading up was very fun!

The next Jupiter-Moon occultation visible ANYWHERE is in about a month: November 2, 2026, which will be visible from Australia, Indonesia, India, and parts of Asia. The next Jupiter-Moon occultation visible from the US however will be November 27, 2037!

Askar FRA400
ZWO ASI6200MM
Photogeaphed from Starfront Remote Observatories

#occultation #moon #space #astrophotography #astronomy taken in Rockwood, Texas by @astrojeff_

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12 days ago

Found some stellar eclipses👀

As part of my ongoing hunt for eclipsing binary stars and exoplanets in my photos, I recently found 2 in my past exoplanet data:

V887 Cep
ATO J009.3285

These are both known eclipsing binary stars, which is a system where 2 stars orbit each other, periodically passing right in front of each other from our POV. This causes the stars to block the light from each other every orbit, causing a characteristic sine-wave-like light curve.

V887 Cep is an Algol-type binary, meaning the light curve is seen to be relatively flat when out of eclipse, with distinct dips during the eclipses. This means that the stars are roughly spherical in shape, and are decently far from each other so they don't distort each other with their own gravity. My light curve caught a very strong eclipse of the system, however it wasn't recorded long enough to capture the full orbit to see the relatively flat out-of-eclipse phases, or to determine whether I caught the primary or secondary eclipse.

ATO J009.3285 is much cooler: its a W Ursae Majoris-type variable, meaning its 2 stars that are physically connected to each other, a system called a "contact binary". These stars are overall similar to the Sun, but are very close together- within 1.5 million km of each other, only about 4x the distance between Earth and the Moon. This also causes the system to have a very fast orbit period: just over 7 hours, meaning you can capture the whole orbit in 1 night.

My observations caught roughly half of the orbit, with the clear W-like light curve of the two stars farthest apart (maximum brightness), coming closer together until one blocks the other (minimum brightness), then separating again toward maximum brightness. My observations also seem to support the stars having similar overall temperature as the minimum brightness in each phase, which is when only one of the stars is visible from our POV, are nearly equal. Contact binary systems like this aren't stable, as over time the stars will accrete matter from each other, changing their mass and orbit period, spiraling ever closer. Eventually, they'll merge as a Luminous Red Nova.

Askar FRA400
ZWO ASI6200MM
AstroImageJ by @astrojeff_

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a month ago

2 more exoplanets from Starfront!

I recently used my remote telescope to measure the transits of two more exoplanets, named TOI-1518b and WASP-93b. The planets are pretty similar- they’re both hot Jupiters (comparable to Jupiter but orbit their star closer than Mercury does to our Sun) orbiting their stars in under 3 days and cause periodic “eclipses” that dim their stars by about 1%.

Askar FRA400
ZWO ASI6200MM
Optolong filters

#astronomycommunity #astrophysics #exoplanets #science #planetaryscience

TOI-1518b was discovered in 2021, and orbits the F-type star TOI-1518 - a roughly similar but slightly hotter version of our Sun, about 750 light years from Earth in the constellation Cepheus. The close orbit of TOI-1518b causes it to be cooked to a crisp by its star, to over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. This high temperature also causes the planet to be “puffed up”, with a larger, more diffuse atmosphere, causing this planet’s bulk density to be only slightly higher than that of a wine cork.

Iron has been detected in the atmosphere of this planet, and interestingly has been found to be very variable. The daytime side of the planet is full of iron in the atmosphere, however the night side has far less. This could point to significantly different chemistry and conditions on the day vs night sides of this planet, although more data would be helpful to confirm that it’s a physical effect and not just some weird fluke. Luckily, the atmosphere of TOI-1518b is very inflated due to being so close to its star, so future atmospheric characterization will be fairly easy.

The Rossiter-McLaughlin effect, a means of measuring the orbital direction and inclination of a planet using spectroscopy, has shown that TOI-1518b orbits its star in a roughly polar orbit, with an inclination of about 77 degrees, a major contrast from the Solar System planets, which all orbit the Sun within 9 degrees of the Sun’s equator.

WASP-93b was discovered in 2016, orbits a similar F-type star about 815 light years away from Earth, and is also an ultra-hot Jupiter. It orbits its host star every 64 hours, and is about 1.6x Jupiter’s radius with about 1.5x its mass. This gives WASP-93b a low dens taken in Rockwood, Texas by @astrojeff_

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a month ago

Cygnus's Cocoon

The Cocoon nebula, or less creatively IC 5146, is a beautiful emission nebula in the constellation Cygnus. Located about 2,500 light years from Earth, the nebula glows the characteristic red of hydrogen gas, surrounded by a dark veil of dust that fills the whole region, including Barnard 168, a dense dark molecular cloud called a dark Streamer.

These two regions directly next to eachother represent two different stages of stellar life. The Cocoon nebula is a hot, energetic region powered by newly-formed stars only about 100,000 years old. Stars within it are working toward/have reached Main Sequence, fusion hydrogen into helium as the Sun does. The Streamer meanwhile is a stellar birthplace: young protostars are buried deep in the dark clouds, accreting material and trying their best to collapse and become a proper star. Interestingly, the distribution of known protostars within the two regions is very different. The Cocoon nebula itself hosts about 100 known young stellar objects (YSOs), mostly older T-Tauri protostars close to reaching mains sequence. The Streamer however hosts only about 20 known protostars, all much younger and more heavily obscured by the dense dust and gas they're forming from.

Askar FRA400
ZWO ASI6200MM-Pro
Optolong 2" LRGB, 3nm Ha filters

5h 28m each (RGB)
+ 8h 45m Ha
+ 7h L
= 32h 9m total (Ha-LRGB)

Photographed from Starfront Remote Observatories

#astrophotography #space #astrophysics #nebula #cosmos by @astrojeff_

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a month ago

Blood Moon - Aug 28, 2026

Finally got what I *think* my final process of this morning's lunar eclipse finished. How some of y'all process within a few minutes blows my mind! Hope you like tho :)

And now we wait until 2029...

Askar FRA400
ZWO ASI6200MM
Optolong 2" RGB filters

Photographed from Starfront Remote Observatories

#bloodmoon #lunareclipse #astrophotography taken in Rockwood, Texas by @astrojeff_

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2 months ago

Got the Blood Moon!

Interestingly, this color photo was not taken with a color camera. It was instead taken with a monochrome camera on my remote telescope at Starfront Observatories! Individual photos through red, green, and blue filters were taken back to back over about 20 seconds, then combined to produce this final photo, showing off the moon's blood red appearance during the near-totality!

Having been taken with RGB filters and aiming at a moving target (the moon), this pic was a pain to figure out how to capture and process, but I feel like I got a pretty decent result.

Hope you like :)

#eclipse #bloodmoon #moon #astrophotography #lunareclipse by @astrojeff_

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2 months ago

10 years of space photos

As of technically 2 months ago, I've officially been a space nerd for 10 years now!

Over the past decade, I've done a lot. I've captured over 25,000 files of data, totaling 2.2 TB, with more than 21,000 of those files being deep-sky subframes. Assuming roughly 3.5 minutes per exposure, that’s over 1,400 hours straight of staring into the void, with the real total likely much higher than this. Additionally, Over 700 of those hours have been captured in just the past year with my remote telescope at Starfront Observatories!

Owning 6 different telescopes over the years, I’ve captured:

46 nebulae,
Dozens of galaxies,
The Sun/Moon,
All the planets except Uranus,
3 dwarf planets,
5 comets, including 3I/ATLAS,
8 eclipses: 5 lunar and 3 solar,
3 known exoplanet transits,
1 supernova and 1 recurrent nova,
and countless millions of stars

After a decade, I'm still doing this, and will always. Can't stop, won't stop

Here's to the next 10 years of astrophotography ✨️🔭📷 by @astrojeff_

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2 months ago