December Skies: A Month of Galaxies, Nebulae, and Not so Cold Nights

Hello and welcome to the very first Justin the Dark monthly newsletter!

Each month, I’ll share a small collection of images captured under the night sky along with short explanations of what you’re seeing and why these objects are worth a closer look. No heavy technical talk, just the story behind the light.

I’m just starting this new blog, so please feel free to share this email with anyone you think would enjoy it and encourage them to subscribe. If you want to see more of the technical detail behind each image, I typically post once a week on the blog with information about the image, how it was captured, and how it was post-processed.

This is our closest large galactic neighbor and the most distant object humans can see without a telescope. The soft glow represents one trillions stars and a galaxy on a collision course with the Milky Way. Don’t worry, that’s billions of years away and you wouldn’t even notice it.

The Triangulum Galaxy is one of the closest spiral galaxies to the Milky Way and is thought to be gravitationally linked to Andromeda. Despite its size, it has an unusually low-density core, giving it a faint, diffuse appearance that makes it challenging to see but incredibly rewarding once revealed.

Often called The Seven Sisters, the Pleiades is a young star cluster wrapped in faint blue reflection nebulae. That soft glow isn’t gas emitting light, rather it’s dust reflecting the starlight itself. This object is visible to the naked eye as a hazy blue cluster of stars. There is a joke in the astrophotography community when someone asks, “What’s that is the sky?” The response is, “It’s the Pleiades, it’s always the Pleiades.”

The Rosette Nebula is a vast cloud of glowing hydrogen shaped by powerful radiation from the young stars at its center. What looks like a delicate flower is actually a turbulent region where stellar winds are carving cavities into the gas, compressing material along the edges and triggering future generations of star formation.

December brought mild nights, steady skies, and a reminder of why I love this hobby so much. Each image represents hours of patience, quiet, and looking up at something peaceful that feels increasingly rare in a busy world.

Thanks for being here and sharing the night sky with me.

Clear skies,

Justin Pickens
Justin the Dark
www.justinthedark.com