B33 masterThe published master.
The plate the room refers back to. Sixteen frames stacked, the dust lane reading red against the IC 434 emission.
— GALLERY · MMXXVI
Pictures made
B33 master
B33 deep
B33 false
B33 ultimate
Sgr A* · Mistral
M31
M16
M45
Crab
NGC 3372
Cen A
M87
SQ
Cyg X-1
Atlas
B33
NGC 3132
NGC 6543
NGC 2237
M16
M51
NGC 4565
M104
M57
M42
NGC 7293
30 Dor
M33
η Car
NGC 6302
M8
M20
Veil
M27
NGC 2024
Mz 3
Sh2-132
NGC 1300
Cartwheel
Pictures made
with 1snob AstroRoom.
Thirty-four photographs, each restacked from public archive data. Each one carries its band, its instrument, its integration time, and a recipe identifier. Every plate has a Merkle root on file — the picture is no longer just a picture.
— PORTRAITS · BARNARD 33
The Horsehead, twelve ways.
The same target — Barnard 33 — developed under twelve different recipes and band combinations. Same FITS source, same crop. Different decisions about colour, stretch, and which photons get the spotlight.
H-α + Blue + J
DSS · Blues_r
WISE12 + K + Blue
DSS · Greyscale
2MASS J · Viridis
IR + Optical + J
WISE 12µm · Hot
WISE 3.4µm · Magma
H-α · Pink
DSS · Optical
DSS · Deep
H-α · Soft pink
— COMPOSITES · BARNARD 33
Four final renders.
Beyond the recipe matrix above, four masters that earned the wall — the Horsehead taken from study to publication.
B33 masterB33 deepThe deep DSS.
The same target driven harder on the stretch. The faint outer dust extends visibly past where the canonical crop ends.
B33 falseThe false-colour.
Three bands run through one of the warm-edge palette family recipes. The silhouette is the same; the temperature reads differently.
B33 ultimateThe ultimate composite.
The composite the team kept after argument — narrowband H-α driving the silhouette, near-IR underneath for the dust geometry, optical broadband as the whisper.
Sgr A* · MistralFor Gabriela Mistral.
A tribute composite of the galactic centre, dedicated to the Chilean poet who wrote about the night sky as if it were a familiar room. Same FITS sources as the standard Sgr A* master; different recipe.
— THIRTY OBJECTS
From the team
From the team
and the early community.
Thirty individual targets. Filter by band, scroll the grid, click any plate to open its provenance.
M31Andromeda, six ways.
The same galaxy in six wavelengths — optical red, optical blue, near-IR, ultraviolet, mid-IR, and a chosen RGB composite. Same dust, different witnesses.
M16Pillars of Creation.
The classic Hubble pillars, restacked from the public archive. The hottest star in the cluster is what's eating the columns from above; the youngest are still forming inside them.
M45The Pleiades.
Reflection nebulosity in the seven sisters' bow shock. The cluster is moving, fast enough that the dust looks like wake.
CrabThe pulsar's wind.
Synchrotron radiation from the supernova remnant of 1054. The yellow knot at the centre is the corpse of the star; it ticks every thirty-three milliseconds.
NGC 3372The Carina Nebula.
The luminous blue variable Eta Carinae lives inside the bright knot. It nearly went supernova in the 1840s and is still deciding whether to finish the job.
Cen AA galaxy eating itself.
NGC 5128 in X-ray. The dust lane is half a billion years old — a fossil of the merger that formed the present galaxy. The bright nucleus is the AGN feeding the central black hole.
M87The jet from a black hole.
Forty-seven Chandra obsids merged into one event file. The jet of M87's central engine, lit in photons that travelled fifty-five million years to reach the chip.
SQFive galaxies, one frame.
A megastack of public JWST exposures. Four of the five are gravitationally bound; one is a foreground impostor that just shares the line of sight.
Sgr A*
Sgr A* across thirty years.
The galactic centre over three decades of Chandra observation, annotated. The flares are real. The orbital tracks are ours.
Cyg X-1Cygnus X-1, state transitions.
A stellar-mass black hole binary across a decade of state changes. Each frame is a different observation; the colour map is the spectral hardness ratio.
AtlasBlack Hole top nine.
A condensed atlas. Nine of the most observable black holes in the sky, each in nine of the recipe library's families.
B33Barnard 33, developed.
Sixteen optical and infrared frames stacked into the iconic silhouette. The dust lane reads red against the IC 434 emission.
NGC 3132The Southern Ring.
NGC 3132 — a planetary nebula caught in the act of expansion. Two stars at the centre, only one of which is the source of the shell.
NGC 6543The Cat's Eye.
One of the most structurally complex planetary nebulae known. The concentric shells are episodic mass loss from the dying central star — one shell every fifteen hundred years.
NGC 2237The Rosette.
An H II region around the open cluster NGC 2244. The cluster carved the cavity. The rim glows because it is being ionised by the brightest stars at the centre.
M16The Eagle, wide.
The Pillars of Creation in their context. The full M16 H II region; the pillars themselves are a small dark feature near the centre.
M51The Whirlpool.
M51 mid-merger with NGC 5195. The grand-design spiral structure is almost certainly enhanced by the gravitational disturbance from the smaller companion.
NGC 4565The Needle.
An edge-on spiral with a dust lane drawn so straight it looks engraved. Forty million light-years away, in Coma Berenices.
M104The Sombrero.
An almost edge-on spiral with a bulge so massive it dominates the silhouette. The dust ring is the disc, seen at six degrees of inclination.
M57The Ring.
M57 in Lyra. A barrel-shaped shell of ionised gas seen end-on, which is why it reads as a ring. The white dwarf at the centre is what's left of the star.
M42Orion's nursery.
The closest large stellar nursery, and the first object most people learn to point at without a finder. The Trapezium cluster sits inside the brightest knot.
NGC 7293The Helix.
The closest planetary nebula to Earth. The "cometary knots" along the inner edge are aerodynamic features — the dying star's wind sculpting denser blobs of gas.
30 DorThe Tarantula.
The largest known stellar nursery in the Local Group, in the Large Magellanic Cloud. R136a1 — the most massive known star — sits inside the central cluster.
M33Triangulum.
Third-largest galaxy in the Local Group, behind Andromeda and our own. The pinwheel structure is unusually clean; the H II regions trace the spiral arms.
η CarEta Carinae's Homunculus.
The bipolar shell ejected during the Great Eruption of the 1840s. The star at the centre is still alive, still a luminous blue variable, still on track to go supernova at some point.
NGC 6302The Butterfly.
A bipolar planetary nebula with a central star at over 200,000 K — among the hottest known. The wings are gas at thousands of degrees, lit by stellar-wind shocks.
M8The Lagoon.
An H II region in Sagittarius with the cluster NGC 6530 at its core. The "hourglass" tornado of gas at the centre is being shaped by a single hot O-type star.
M20The Trifid.
The "three-lobed" emission nebula, divided by dust lanes that read as silhouettes against the H-α background. The reflection-nebula component above gives the colour gradient.
VeilThe Veil.
A small section of the Cygnus Loop, the fading shock front of a supernova that exploded around 5,000 BC. The filaments are gas being heated as it slams into the surrounding ISM.
M27The Dumbbell.
M27 in Vulpecula. A planetary nebula about 1,360 light-years away, expanding at thirty kilometres a second. The shell is more or less spherical; the apparent dumbbell shape is projection.
NGC 2024The Flame Nebula.
A star-forming region in Orion, dust-obscured in optical but luminous in mid-IR. The young stars carving out the cavity at the centre would be hidden without the longer wavelengths.
Mz 3The Ant Nebula.
A bipolar planetary nebula with a structure so complex the central system is almost certainly a binary. The lobes look symmetric only because we are seeing them edge-on.
Sh2-132The Lion.
An H II region in Cepheus shaped by the winds from two Wolf-Rayet stars. The narrowband filter set separates the ionisation states cleanly enough to read like a chemical map.
NGC 1300NGC 1300.
A barred spiral so well organised it became the textbook example. The bar is solid; the arms wind out from its endpoints. Fifty million light-years away, in Eridanus.
CartwheelThe Cartwheel.
A galaxy hit head-on by another, two hundred million years ago. The collision sent a ring-shaped wave outward; the wave is still expanding at over two hundred kilometres a second, igniting star formation as it goes.
Thirty-four objects plus a Horsehead portrait set is not the limit. The gallery grows with each edition. If you have a target you want to see in the next edition, the room takes requests in the monthly letter.