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Ani Shastry aka Starman

@starman_astro

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Amateur astrophotographer on a quest to capture the wonders of the endless sea that has no shores. All content is my own. 🌟

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Bernes 142 è una nube oscura situata nel cuore di Chamaeleon 🌌🔭👍🏻🔝

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Bernes 142 is a dark cloud at the heart of Chamaeleon I, one of the Sun’s nearest stellar nurseries at roughly 600 light years. Bernes’ 1977 catalogue surveyed bright nebulae buried in opaque dust. This field holds three, each a lantern lit by a star that has only just begun to shine. From Chile, this southern cloud circles the celestial pole without setting.

Right of center and a little below, Cederblad 111, an electric blue reflection nebula, wraps around HD 97048, a young Herbig Ae/Be star still carrying its birth disk. Dust streams past in fine combed filaments, like smoke caught in a beam of light. Upper left, Cederblad 110 answers in warm amber, a reflection nebula split by a dark lane and hollowed into a C shape. Hidden within is Ced 110 IRS 4, a protostellar binary so deeply embedded that only infrared telescopes can see it. Its light has let the James Webb Space Telescope probe the ices frozen onto the cloud’s grains.

Below and right of the blue, the Chamaeleon Infrared Nebula opens as a small orange fan: a bipolar reflection nebula carved by jets from a newborn low mass star tunneling out of the cloud. Faint crimson knots between the nebulae are shocked gas where other outflows strike the cloud.

What holds me in this image is how much of it is dark. The nebulae are small islands in a molecular cloud folding over itself in brown and ochre layers thick enough to swallow the background stars. Seventeen hours of exposure went into that darkness, chasing the cloud’s faint texture until the shadows themselves became the subject.

Captured from my remote setup at Obstech in Chile:
🔭 PlaneWave CDK500 Observatory System
📸 Moravian C5A-100M Camera
🎨 Chroma L, R, G, B Filters
📀 L: 68×300s, R: 80×180s, G: 78×180s, B: 74×180s (17.27 hours)
🖥️ Processed in PixInsight and Adobe Photoshop

#astrophotography
#darknebula
#chamaeleonconstellation
#Astrofotografia by @starman_astro

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13

6 days ago

Bernes 142 is a dark cloud at the heart of Chamaeleon I, one of the Sun’s nearest stellar nurseries at roughly 600 light years. Bernes’ 1977 catalogue surveyed bright nebulae buried in opaque dust. This field holds three, each a lantern lit by a star that has only just begun to shine. From Chile, this southern cloud circles the celestial pole without setting.

Right of center and a little below, Cederblad 111, an electric blue reflection nebula, wraps around HD 97048, a young Herbig Ae/Be star still carrying its birth disk. Dust streams past in fine combed filaments, like smoke caught in a beam of light. Upper left, Cederblad 110 answers in warm amber, a reflection nebula split by a dark lane and hollowed into a C shape. Hidden within is Ced 110 IRS 4, a protostellar binary so deeply embedded that only infrared telescopes can see it. Its light has let the James Webb Space Telescope probe the ices frozen onto the cloud’s grains.

Below and right of the blue, the Chamaeleon Infrared Nebula opens as a small orange fan: a bipolar reflection nebula carved by jets from a newborn low mass star tunneling out of the cloud. Faint crimson knots between the nebulae are shocked gas where other outflows strike the cloud.

What holds me in this image is how much of it is dark. The nebulae are small islands in a molecular cloud folding over itself in brown and ochre layers thick enough to swallow the background stars. Seventeen hours of exposure went into that darkness, chasing the cloud’s faint texture until the shadows themselves became the subject.

Captured from my remote setup at Obstech in Chile:
🔭 PlaneWave CDK500 Observatory System
📸 Moravian C5A-100M Camera
🎨 Chroma L, R, G, B Filters
📀 L: 68×300s, R: 80×180s, G: 78×180s, B: 74×180s (17.27 hours)
🖥️ Processed in PixInsight and Adobe Photoshop

#astronomy #astrophotography #galaxy #galaxies #nebula #star #stars #universe #space #moon #telescope #planewave #cosmos #stargazing #deepsky #milkyway #astrophoto #deepskyastrophotography #passioneastrofotografia #birth #blue #orange #infrared #lantern #lanterns taken in Obstech - Observatorio El Sauce by @starman_astro

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7 days ago

NGC 6744 is often called the Milky Way’s mirror, a grand spiral some 30 million light-years away in Pavo, the Peacock, and one of the southern sky’s most compelling sights. Spanning roughly 175,000 light-years, it is nearly twice our galaxy’s size, yet follows a familiar design: an elongated golden core of ancient stars, a gentle central bar, and feathered arms unwinding into the dark with unhurried grace. Could we step outside the Milky Way and look back, the view might feel remarkably like this.

Its structure reveals itself as color. Older stars warm the core to amber, while young clusters scatter blue light along the arms like sea spray. Threaded through them, the 5nm hydrogen-alpha data illuminates rose-colored HII regions: stellar nurseries strung like beacons where the galaxy is still creating new suns. Near an outer arm, the small companion NGC 6744A echoes our own galaxy’s relationship with the Magellanic Clouds. The resemblance to home runs deeper than appearance.

What draws me here is precisely that resemblance. We live inside the Milky Way and cannot see its face; every map is an inference, assembled from within the forest. But here, suspended in the still fields of Pavo, is something close to a self-portrait: a galaxy of the same family, caught mid-rotation, its bar channeling gas inward, its arms quietly manufacturing stars. Looking at it feels less like observing a distant object and more like being handed a mirror across 30 million light-years.

Captured from my remote setup at Obstech in Chile:
🔭 PlaneWave CDK600 Observatory System
📸 Moravian C5A-100M Camera
🎨 Chroma L, R, G, B, and 5nm Ha Filters
📀 L: 58×600s, R: 52×300s, G: 63×300s, B: 54×300s, Ha: 22×1200s (31.08 hours)
🖥️ Processed in PixInsight and Adobe Photoshop

#astronomy #astrophotography #galaxy #galaxies #nebula #star #stars #universe #space #moon #telescope #planewave #cosmos #stargazing #deepsky #milkyway #astrophoto #deepskyastrophotography #passioneastrofotografia #milkyway #home taken in Obstech - Observatorio El Sauce by @starman_astro

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14 days ago

NGC 3981 looks like a galaxy coming undone. An amber heart burns through knotted dust, while blue spiral arms trail away in long, ragged veils. Follow them far enough and their light becomes almost indistinguishable from the darkness. Some 65 million light-years away in Crater, NGC 3981 bears the marks of gravity’s restless tides in its windswept arms. Yet for all that has pulled at it, stretched it, and tried to reshape it, the galaxy holds.

Even in the field of the mighty PlaneWave CDK20, it is a dot. And that is not all that makes it brutal to process. The core is bright, structured and unforgiving, while the outer arms live barely above the noise floor and must be coaxed out of the darkness. Reveal too little and they disappear. Push too far and the darkness begins inventing things that aren’t there. Much of the work was simply knowing when to stop.

I began collecting this light early in the year and continued for months from my CDK500 at Obstech, Chile. A camera change from the Moravian C3-61000 PRO to the C5A-100M complicated things; different datasets, multiple sets of biases, darks and flats, and plenty of troubleshooting with the Obstech crew before it all finally came together.

But this image of the Wind-Swept Galaxy was never really about the equipment; it had a specific destination: For my wife, @laramarrr, on her 50th birthday.

Captured from my remote setup at Obstech in Chile:
🔭 PlaneWave CDK500 Observatory System
📸 Moravian C3-61000 PRO and C5A-100M Cameras
🎨 Chroma L, R, G and B Filters
📀 L: 82x600s, R: 82x300s, G: 93x300s, B: 91x300s (35.83 hours)
🖥️ Processed in PixInsight and Adobe Photoshop

#astronomy #astrophotography #galaxy #galaxies #nebula #star #stars #universe #space #moon #telescope #planewave #cosmos #stargazing #deepsky #milkyway #astrophoto #deepskyastrophotography #passioneastrofotografia #wind #swept #ngc3981 #strong #enterprise taken in Obstech - Observatorio El Sauce by @starman_astro

5k

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a month ago

There are objects you image, and there are objects you owe. The Great Carina Nebula is the southern sky’s masterpiece—a star-forging wilderness vast enough to swallow the full Moon many times over. Though 8,500 light-years away, nearly six times farther than Orion, it still blazes brighter. This frame holds its beating heart.

At the center, tangled in ribbons of gold, burns Eta Carinae, one of the most massive and volatile stars known. During the Great Eruption of the 1840s, it hurled ten Suns’ worth of matter into space and briefly became the second-brightest star in the night sky before vanishing into the twin-lobed Homunculus of its own making. Beside it hangs the Keyhole, the hooked silhouette of dust John Herschel sketched nearly two centuries ago.

The blue lagoon of doubly ionized oxygen at the core is carved by two young star cities: Trumpler 16, home to Eta Carinae, and the dense diamond swarm of Trumpler 14. Their fierce O stars have hollowed a glowing cavity in the cloud; where their radiation strikes, Carina answers in waves of rose and magenta, threaded by black rivers of drifting dust.

Nearly twenty-two hours went into this SHO-enhanced RGB rendering. True RGB anchors the palette, hydrogen deepens the reds, oxygen lifts the blue heart, and sulfur reveals structure almost as a pseudo-luminance. I wanted the core luminous but unburned, the Keyhole crisp, and the outer dust allowed to remain dark. Carina is not merely a spectacle of light—it is a cloud tearing itself apart while building new suns from the wreckage.

Captured from my remote setup at Obstech in Chile:
🔭 PlaneWave CDK500 Observatory System
📸 Moravian C5A-100M Camera
🎨 Chroma R, G, B, 3nm Ha, Oiii and Sii Filters
📀 R: 18×300s, G: 16×300s, B: 19×300s, Ha: 19×1200s, Oiii: 18×1200s, Sii: 15×1200s (21.75 hours)
🖥️ Processed in PixInsight and Adobe Photoshop

#astronomy #astrophotography #galaxy #galaxies #nebula #star #stars #universe #space #moon #telescope #planewave #cosmos #stargazing #deepsky #milkyway #astrophoto #deepskyastrophotography #passioneastrofotografia #eta #carina #homunculus #trumpler taken in Obstech - Observatorio El Sauce by @starman_astro

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2 months ago

NGC 3621 is a galaxy that should not work. Some 22 million light years away in Hydra, it is a spiral with no bulge at all. Where most galaxies carry a glowing central swarm of old stars, this one is pure disk, a sheet of stars and gas spun flat, with only a modest golden core marking its heart. Galaxies are supposed to grow through mergers, and mergers build bulges, so a disk this clean suggests a quiet life, eons spent spinning alone at the edge of the Leo Spur while the rest of the universe collided around it.

Yet the quiet is deceptive. The disk is flocculent, its arms broken into hundreds of woolly tufts of star formation rather than grand sweeping spirals, and the deep hydrogen data lights them up: dozens of rose-pink HII regions scattered along the blue star clouds like embers in ash. Deeper still, the nucleus hides a surprise. Despite the missing bulge, its spectrum betrays an active center, evidence that a black hole grew here anyway, without the merger history that supposedly feeds one. NGC 3621 also carries scientific weight out of proportion to its fame: it was one of the galaxies whose Cepheid variables the Hubble Space Telescope used to calibrate the cosmic distance scale.

This field rewards wandering. A perfect little face-on spiral hangs above the galaxy, and the black around it is salted with dozens of background galaxies, ellipticals, edge-on slivers, and faint smudges hundreds of times farther away, all framed by the golden and blue foreground stars of our own Milky Way.

Captured from my remote setup at Obstech in Chile: 🔭 PlaneWave CDK600 Observatory System 📸 Moravian C5A-100M Camera 🎨 Chroma L, R, G, B, and 3nm Ha Filters 📀 L: 95×600s, R: 61×300s, G: 62×300s, B: 64×300s, Ha: 23×1200s (39.08 hours) 🖥️ Processed in PixInsight and Adobe Photoshop

#astronomy #astrophotography #galaxy #galaxies #nebula #star #stars #universe #space #moon #telescope #planewave #cosmos #beautiful #stargazing #deepsky #planet #planets #orbital #orbitals #milkyway #astrophoto #deepskyastrophotography #beautiful #passioneastrofotografia #ngc3621 #hydra #disk #bulge taken in Obstech - Observatorio El Sauce by @starman_astro

4k

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2 months ago

NGC 5078 is an edge-on spiral galaxy adrift in the quiet reaches of Hydra, roughly 90 million light-years away. Its golden core burns at the center of a soft, pale halo of ancient stars, and slicing across that light is the galaxy’s defining feature: a ragged, knotted dust lane that runs the full length of the disk. Where many edge-on spirals wear their dust as a thin, disciplined line, the lane in NGC 5078 is torn and turbulent, fraying into dark tendrils that spill above and below the plane. That distortion is not decoration. It is evidence of an encounter still in progress.

The culprit hangs just beside it: IC 879, a small spiral caught in NGC 5078’s gravitational grip. In the image it appears as a delicate blue-white swirl twisted into a soft S, its cool tones a quiet counterpoint to the warm gold of its larger neighbor. The two galaxies are close enough to be exchanging more than glances. Tidal forces from the passage have roughened the larger galaxy’s dust lane and wound the little companion out of shape. It is a portrait of galactic interaction at its most intimate scale, not the head-on collision of the Antennae but a slow, deliberate distortion, two islands of stars reshaping one another across a narrow strait of darkness.

Over 25 hours of integration went into this rendering. Long luminance exposures pull the faint stellar halo and the outer reaches of the disk out of the sky, and the RGB preserves the delicate color balance between the aging golden core and the cooler tones at the disk’s edge.

Captured from my remote setup at Obstech in Chile:
🔭 PlaneWave CDK600 Observatory System
📸 Moravian C5A-100M Camera
🎨 Chroma L, R, G, and B Filters
📀 L: 55×600s, R: 70×300s, G: 60×300s, B: 61×300s (25.08 hours)
🖥️ Processed in PixInsight and Adobe Photoshop

#astronomy #astrophotography #galaxy #galaxies #nebula #star #stars #universe #space #moon #telescope #planewave #cosmos #beautiful #stargazing #deepsky #planet #planets #orbital #orbitals #milkyway #astrophoto #deepskyastrophotography #beautiful #passioneastrofotografia #ngc5078 #spiral taken in Obstech - Observatorio El Sauce by @starman_astro

2k

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2 months ago

NGC 6164: The Dragon's Egg Nebula in Ara 🐉

Somewhere in Ara, 4,200 light years from here, a dragon has left its egg glowing in the dark.

It formed in violence. The brilliant star at its center, HD 148937, was once two stars, locked in a spiral that ended in a devouring embrace. The survivor emerged changed, magnetic, strangely young, and it flung the remains of that night skyward, where they still curl around it as a perfect egg of rose colored fire. When John Herschel swept the southern sky nearly two centuries ago, he caught its twin lobes as two separate objects, NGC 6164 and NGC 6165, never suspecting they were halves of a single creature born of a single catastrophe.

But look past the egg. Almost too faint to believe, a chrysalis of blue oxygen breathes around the whole scene, shell within translucent shell, the ghost of winds that blew before the collision. This is what I came for. Night after night the 1200 second exposures fell like drops into a well, almost 25 hours in all, until the halo finally rose out of the blackness like breath on cold glass, hydrogen holding the egg in warm rose light while oxygen spun its silk around everything.

A few degrees away, the Fighting Dragons of Ara rear against the same darkness. I captured that earlier this year and you can see it further down in my posts. I like to think the sky keeps its stories together: the beasts locked in battle, and here, wrapped in blue silk and waiting, the egg they guard. Every dragon guards its treasure.

Captured from my remote setup at Obstech in Chile:
🔭 PlaneWave CDK600 Observatory System
📸 Moravian C5A-100M Camera
🎨 Chroma Ha, Oiii, R, G, and B Filters
📀 Ha: 37×1200s, Oiii: 32×1200s, R: 16×120s, G: 19×120s, B: 19×120s (24.80 hours)
🖥️ Processed in PixInsight and Adobe Photoshop

#astronomy #astrophotography #galaxy #galaxies #nebula #star #stars #universe #space #moon #telescope #planewave #cosmos #beautiful #stargazing #deepsky #planet #planets #orbital #orbitals #milkyway #astrophoto #deepskyastrophotography #beautiful #passioneastrofotografia #dragon #dragons #egg taken in Obstech - Observatorio El Sauce by @starman_astro

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2 months ago

NGC 6514: The Trifid Nebula

Few objects in the night sky combine such striking beauty with such rich astrophysical complexity as the Trifid Nebula. Nestled within the dense star fields of Sagittarius, approximately 5,200 light-years from Earth, NGC 6514 (or M20) is one of the Milky Way's most spectacular stellar nurseries.

Its iconic appearance is created by three distinct components existing together in a single region of space. The brilliant magenta glow is an emission nebula, where intense ultraviolet radiation from a young, massive star ionizes surrounding hydrogen gas. Dark lanes of dense interstellar dust carve dramatic divisions through the glowing cloud, giving the Trifid its distinctive three-lobed structure. Above the emission region, a delicate blue reflection nebula shines as starlight scatters from microscopic dust grains, creating one of the most beautiful natural color contrasts in the night sky.

One of the aspects I find most captivating about the Trifid is how it captures multiple stages of stellar evolution within a single field of view. It is a place where stars are being born, where young stars illuminate their natal clouds, and where the very materials that will eventually become future stars and planetary systems are already taking shape. It is, quite literally, a portrait of creation in progress.

Captured from my remote setup at Obstech in Chile:
🔭 PlaneWave CDK600 Observatory System
📸 Moravian C5A-100M Camera
🎨 Chroma L, R, G, B Filters
📀 L: 44×600s, R: 62×300s, G: 48×300s, B: 43×300s (20.08 hours)
🖥️ Processed in PixInsight and Adobe Photoshop

#astronomy #astrophotography #galaxy #galaxies #nebula #star #stars #universe #space #moon #telescope #planewave #cosmos #beautiful #stargazing #deepsky #planet #planets #orbital #orbitals #milkyway #astrophoto #deepskyastrophotography #beautiful #passioneastrofotografia #trifid #lobes #flowers taken in Obstech - Observatorio El Sauce by @starman_astro

3k

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3 months ago

Bernes 146, or NGC 5367, is a rarely imaged reflection and dark nebula in Centaurus, part of the remarkable CG 12 complex—a high-latitude star-forming region that feels almost improbably suspended above the plane of the Milky Way. In this field, luminous blue dust gathers around young stars and spills outward into vast, smoke-like veils, while colder, darker lanes of obscuring material drift through the scene like ash carried on a cosmic current. It feels less like a fixed object and more like an atmosphere in motion, poised between revelation and disappearance.

What drew me to Bernes 146 is the extraordinary contrast of textures and color. The bright blue cores have an almost electric intensity, embedded within sweeping amber-brown dust that stretches far beyond them in delicate, translucent folds. There is a beautiful tension here between softness and structure: the nebula appears ethereal at first glance, yet the longer one looks, the more detail emerges in the faint outer wisps, the carved dark lanes, and the distant background galaxies shining through the field. It is a deeply contemplative region—quiet, intricate, and full of hidden depth.

This is one of those targets whose beauty arrives gradually. It reveals itself not through spectacle alone, but through nuance: subtle gradients, layered dust, and the intimate interplay between scattered starlight and shadow. Bernes 146 glows like a fragile island of reflection nebulosity wrapped in darkness, suspended at the threshold of visibility.

Captured from my remote setup at Obstech in Chile:
🔭 PlaneWave CDK500 Observatory System
📸 Moravian C5A-100M Camera
🎨 Chroma L, R, G, B Filters
📀 L: 36x600s, R: 36x300s, G: 36x300s, B: 36x300s (15 hours)
🖥️ Processed in PixInsight and Adobe Photoshop

#astronomy #astrophotography #galaxy #galaxies #nebula #star #stars #universe #space #moon #telescope #planewave #cosmos #beautiful #stargazing #deepsky #planet #planets #orbital #orbitals #milkyway #astrophoto #deepskyastrophotography #beautiful #passioneastrofotografia #mountain #blue #dust taken in Obstech - Observatorio El Sauce by @starman_astro

2k

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4 months ago

🔭 A deep-space giant in action 🌌

Today’s featured target is LBN 990, a faint cloud of interstellar dust and gas stretching across a rich star field. Objects like this are often overlooked, but long exposures with premium equipment can reveal an incredible amount of hidden structure.

Astrophotographer Ani Shastry captured this stunning image using a PlaneWave CDK500 Observatory System - a world-class 20-inch telescope designed for professional-grade imaging. The combination of exceptional optics and careful data collection brought out the delicate details of this elusive target beautifully.

Give Ani a follow at @starman_astro for more breathtaking views of the deep sky! 🔭✨
________
🔭 @observable.space PlaneWave CDK500 Observatory System
📷 Moravian C5A-100M Camera
🎨 Chroma LRGB Filters by @starman_astro

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8

5 months ago

NGC 6188: The Fighting Dragons Of Ara: A Two Mosaic Panel

NGC 6188 is one of the great sculpted battlegrounds of the southern sky: a vast emission nebula in Ara where young, massive stars have carved the surrounding gas into towering ridges, glowing walls, and dark, sinuous lanes of dust. Its nickname, The Fighting Dragons Of Ara, feels especially apt here — across this two-panel mosaic, the nebula stretches like a mythic battlefield, with serrated crimson crests, curling shadows, and luminous blue-violet depths locked in a frozen celestial struggle.

Rendered in SHO with RGB stars, this image reveals NGC 6188 as a landscape of creation and erosion. The upper ridge burns with ragged red and amber edges, while cooler blue and violet structures seem to flow like smoke through the frame. Dark dust lanes cut through the scene with an almost calligraphic force, giving shape to the dragons themselves: wings unfurling, jaws opening, tendrils reaching across the star field.

What I love most about this region is its sense of motion. The nebula feels alive — violent and graceful at once, a cosmic shoreline where light, gas, and dust are constantly reshaping one another. The two-panel mosaic gives the structure room to breathe, preserving the sweeping panoramic tension of the scene while still allowing the small details — pillars, knots, filaments, and star-forming pockets — to emerge from within the larger dragon-like forms.

Captured from my remote setup at Obstech in Chile:
PlaneWave CDK500 Observatory System
Moravian C5A-100M Camera
Chroma R, G, B, 3nm Ha, 3nm Oiii, and 3nm Sii Filters
R: 34×120s, G: 33×120s, B: 37×120s, H: 43×1200s, O: 41×1200s, S: 44×1200s (46.13 hours)
Processed in PixInsight and Adobe Photoshop

#astronomy #astrophotography #galaxy #galaxies #nebula #star #stars #universe #space #moon #telescope #planewave #cosmos #beautiful #stargazing #deepsky #planet #planets #orbital #orbitals #milkyway #astrophoto #deepskyastrophotography #beautiful #passioneastrofotografia #ara #dragon #dragons taken in Obstech - Observatorio El Sauce by @starman_astro

3k

22

5 months ago