My thoughts on the craft, the process and the subjects
Here are the inks of the first three panels of page 9 of my fluids manga book. This is a calculation of the axis-switching wavelength of a water jet according to the modern model. In fact, as it’s explained here, a simplified model of the phenomenon already existed when “La Source” was painted, but the painting doesn’t agree with it.
Taking a break from shooting galaxies far-far away: this colourful globular cluster is located within our galaxy, although in isolation – 38,800 light-years from the centre of the Milky Way and far above the galactic plane. M3 contains more than 500,000 stars, at least 274 of which are variable, which is more than any other known cluster. The brightness of variable stars fluctuates with time, making them useful for estimating their distances.
This image is a 4-hr LRGB exposure, taken at the end of April, 2025 in my yard in Victoria, BC. It took this light 34,000 years to travel here.
his is one of my favourite galaxies. It is one of the largest and brightest in the observable sky from my latitude, and it’s full of fascinating details. The pink glowing spots are the nebulae consisting of ionized hydrogen, where the new stars are formed. Clusters of these new hot stars are visible as the bright blue dots in the spiral arms.
The Pinwheel is nearly twice as large as our Milky Way galaxy – about 170,000 light-years across, and it contains trillion stars. Their light travelled for 21 million years to reach my camera in Victoria, BC.
This image is an integration of 5.5 hours of exposure, collected over two nights April 2025.
This month, I was able to photograph nebulae in another galaxy! The bright red spots in the spiral arms of NGC 2403 are clouds of ionized hydrogen, where new stars are being born. The galaxy is also the place of the most recent observed death of a star – a supernova SN 2004dj was discovered in one of its arms by an amateur Japanese astronomer in 2004. A massive star exploded at the end of its life, shedding the outer layers of gas and sending them away from its collapsed core.
I think it’s incredible that we can observe these amazing deep-sky events from our backyards. This light travelled for 11 million years before reaching my camera in Victoria, BC. This photo required a processing approach that was new to me. It’s a 4 hours of total exposure, collected over two nights. The H-alpha light emission from the nebulae was captured through a separate narrowband filter and integrated into the LRGB (Luminance-Red-Green-Blue) image using the continuum subtraction technique.
Last week, I’ve collected about 5.25 hrs of total exposure of the famous Whirlpool galaxy. I photographed it almost exactly a year ago with a different camera, and it was the first galaxy image that I was quite pleased with. Well, the show itself didn’t change much in a year, although this is a galactic interaction in progress. The dwarf companion galaxy NGC 5195 has been flying past the Whirlpool for hundreds of millions of years, generating plumes of gas driven by the tidal forces between the two galaxies.
The M51 itself is about 400 million years old. We are seeing the stage of the intergalactic dance that actually happened quite a while ago because of how incredibly far these galaxies are. Their light travelled for 31 million years before reaching my yard in Victoria, BC.
The last panel of my comic book on fluid mechanics. This is where we start to see that with some mathematical analysis it will be possible to quantify the degree of realism (or lack thereof) in the depiction of fluid motion in (neo)classical paintings.
This is the ink of the second panel of page 8 of my fluid mechanics manga. I’ve decided to show the fluid physics material the way I present it in my own teaching videos. The idea is that a character is writing on a tablet, and the equations appear on the screen. This is the way it actually happened in my online lectures.
Here is the inked first panel on page 8 of my fluids manga. This is the point of the story where it becomes clear that some quantitative analysis of the depicted fluids phenomenon (the water jet pouring from the pitcher) is possible.
I’ve had a chance to add a couple of exposure hours of M81 and it’s neighbour M82, the Cigar Galaxy (on the right in the wide-field image.) The pair was one of my first targets when I picked up astrophotography last year.
M81 is 96,000 light-years in diameter, and the supermassive black hole in its centre has 15 times more mass than the black hole of our home Milky Way galaxy. Bode’s galaxy interacts with the nearby Cigar Galaxy, causing it to form new stars 10 times faster than the star-birth rate in the Milky Way galaxy.
The light in this photo is truly ancient – these photons travelled for 12 million years before reaching my camera. This is 5 hours of exposure collected at f/5.9 over two nights, almost exactly a year apart, from my yard in Victoria, BC.
One of the most recognizable nebulae, the dark head of a horse has its own catalogue number: B33. It’s a dense cloud of dust and cold hydrogen gas that blocks the light of the background stars and the red glow of ionized hydrogen. The large emission nebula in the background is IC 434 – an enormously active star-forming region. The bright young stars in it’s centre compress the gas with their stellar wind, creating new stars. The mass of the gas displaced by the ionization front of IC434 is about 10,000 Solar masses! I find it difficult to grasp the enormity of the number. This shouldn’t be surprising, of course, because there is nothing even remotely comparable to this truly astronomical mass that we encounter in daily life. For reference, one Solar mass is approximately 2*10^30 ( 2 nonillion) kg!
The bright dots at the base of the Horsehead are the stars that have just been formed, and the bluish smudge to the bottom left is a small reflection nebula NGC 2023. The bright explosion-like emission nebula farther to the left is the Flame Nebula (NGC 2024), which has streaks of black dust blocking the background radiation.
This light travelled for 1,350 years before reaching my camera in Victoria, BC in January 2025. This is a 3.5-hr one-shot exposure at f/5.9 with a one-shot-colour (OSC) camera and a dual narrowband filter.
