Framed Astro Art
Each example of our Telescope Astro Art is available in 3 different sizes:
Small = 18" x 12" (46cm x 32cm)
Medium = 24" x 15" (61cm x 39cm)
Large = 42" x 25" (107cm x 65cm)
Sizing includes frame. In some pieces dimension may vary due composition of the imagery
All imagery was captured, processed, and composed by real Dark Rangers. Each example of deep space astrophotography required hours of data collection per image, utilizing our same research-grade telescopes that we entertain our guest with nightly. Yes, you can even purchase images of our photogenic telescopes themselves.
Pricing includes shipping to any verifiable address in the USA. An additional 7.35% will be charged for Utah Sales Tax.
Nebulae
Rosette Star-birth Nebula
Not everything in astronomy was named poorly. The only things this cosmic rose is missing is a stem, thorns, and leaves… But the color is good, right? However, if this nebula was gold in color as some astrophotographers color it, maybe we would have called it the “Glazed old-fashioned cake donut nebula”? And yes, roses come in yellow, but we don’t want you to be “in like” with astronomy. We want you to love astronomy!
Most nebulae are mostly brown, blue, or red. Research astronomers use filters to block those predominant colors and, if necessary, manipulate software saturation sliders to draw out the tiny amounts of yellow and green. The resulting rainbow of colors helps reveal details like the Bok Globules, which are the extra dense lumps of dust and gas from which newborn stars hatch. Of course, they are also visible in this authentically red image, you just have to study the photo a little more closely. Many astrophotographers, mimic this practice. Some might be hoping it lends scientific credibility to their work. Others probably just like making space as pretty as possible.
The Rosette Nebula is truly red, and yet at 5,000 light years away, the rate of photons that manage to land inside even a BIG telescope is so low that the red can only be accumulated enough to be revealed in long-exposure photography. Complicating matters, red is the hardest color for human eyes to detect, especially while in night-vision mode. Therefore, even when looking at this nebula through our biggest telescopes, it’s difficult to notice the contrast of dark gray against darker gray. Nobody would buy a framed print of a gray rose, so we present the authentic photography version rather than approximating the authentic human view.
If you think that’s pedantic, we are only getting started. Paradoxically, nebulae are only colorful from very far away. In fact, if you were inside a nebula, you would only see empty space. Even long exposure pictures would reveal nothing besides distant stars. Yet, stars in that night sky would be sharper and brighter than our view of space which is partially obscured by Earth’s super-dense nebula known as “our atmosphere”. In extreme contrast, space nebulae are as close to being nothing as anything in the Universe can be, and still be referred to as something. Where Earth’s invisible air has 10 quintillion (19 zeros) molecules per cubic centimeter, star-birth nebulae average below 10,000/cm3 which is the ultimate kind of transparent.
First consider the age-old question, ‘Why is the sky blue?’ The answer is that nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide and water-vapor (99.9% of our planets atmosphere) all have small enough kinetic diameters, that these molecules can normally only “scatter” (aka reflect in different directions) blue light. In particular water molecules, because they have the smallest sphere of influence in disrupting inbound photons from our Sun, are only barely blue. This is why small amounts of water, like a glassful’s worth are transparent, but huge amounts of H2O in the form of streams, lakes, and oceans are blue, if you are looking at them from a distance. Yes, reflection from a blue sky helps “blue” bodies of water, but they don’t turn white under cloudy sky, do they? Finally, swimmers among us will have noticed that when you are inside a body of water it’s back to being mostly transparent again? Yet when you hop out into the boat or on to the dock, that same water is mostly blue again. Magic? No. Science! When the scattered light come from a single direction, up in case of a lake, or down in the case of the sky, you can detect the accumulation of faint amount of color. But when the light is scatter from every direction, below the surface, or inside a room, there less color. So too are nebulae invisible from the inside, and only translucently red, blue, or brown when viewed from light years away where all photons are coming from the same tiny point in the sky.
Once you grasp this reality, Science Fiction will be further ruined for you. Star Trek spaceships flying through colorful nebulae is even more cartoonish than Crayola®-ing your astrophotography. Much to the Dark Rangers’ disappointment, even NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) seem to prioritize pretty over plausibility and consequently have filled their YouTube channels with many such misleading nebula fly-through animations. It would be excusable if these high-production-value animations came with a footnote explaining the true nature of these space clouds. That would leave a jumping-off point for curiosity and deeper understanding. Without that it more like science fiction than space science.
Who are the Dark Rangers to fault the two of our planet’s four leading space agencies? Science doesn’t really care how popular or well-funded you are, it only cares about whether your presentation of information is consistent with reality or not. It doesn’t even matter that at the time of this printing, Dark Ranger Telescope Tours remains the #1 ranked telescope experience on Earth – according to TripAdvisor.com That’s not necessarily an indication of scholarship, just a measure of how entertaining we are. But it does suggest that the difference might be that we don’t feel we have to compromise scientific accuracy to wow people.
Orion Star-birth Nebula
Few deep space objects are bright enough for human eyes to detect their true color even when using BIG telescopes. This leaves some neophytes to astronomy confused or even disappointed by the difference between what they see in pictures and what they see in our telescopes, which requires some explaining. Yet, the wispy-pale blue of the Orion Star-birth Nebula disappoints nobody, and it is almost self-explanatory. This immense space cloud, reminiscent of a pterodactyl, dragon, or some mythical flying creature, has a wingspan of 25 light years and soars through our galaxy some 1400 light years away. Here, newborn stars with their intense blue light are illuminating the cloud that gave them life, and also sculpting it with their stellar wind, powered by the fury of their nuclear fusion.
If the telescope is the second greatest tool of astronomy, math being the first, then astrophotography would be a close third. The Orion Nebula was a favorite subject of astronomy's first photographer, Andrew Ainslie Common. Using gelatin plate photography, he imaged the outer planets, their faint moons, and the Great Comet of 1881, but what won him the Royal Astronomical Society's gold medal in 1884 were his images of the Orion Nebula. Having perfected that early form of black and white photography, his BIG but nevertheless still backyard telescope, revealed more than any human eye had ever seen through Earth's largest research telescopes. Astrophotography has advanced the science of astronomy ever since.
Paradoxically, sometimes a human eye at an eyepiece can see more than astrophotography can reveal. Case in point is the Trapezium Star Cluster in the heart of the Orion Nebula. Almost every photograph taken shows an overexposed region without any detail where the flying creature's chest would be. The human eye is better at distinguishing a variety of different contrast ratios across the same view. When you get a perfect focus, you'll be able to see into that figurative chest cavity where sitting in a void of their own making, are 5 blazing bright newborn stars systems, all with companion stars and two being 5-star systems! That much energy not only overwhelms cameras, but their combined stellar wind will eventually clean out the entire nebula until only a star cluster remains. As a result of this stellar evolution, star-birth nebulae like the Orion nebula become star clusters like the Pleiades.
Until you attend the Dark Ranger Observatory in winter you won't get to see the original photons from Orion Nebula and its Trapezium Star Cluster, but you could own your own copy of this Dark Ranger Telescope Astro Art in the meantime.
Galaxies
Andromeda Galaxy and Companions
Andromeda, like all large galaxies, travels through space with an escort of smaller galaxies known as companion or satellite galaxies. An analogy might be how an aircraft carrier is flanked by cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and an unconfirmed submarine or two. Andromeda is the largest such fleet in our section of Universe, having at least 13 such "satellite" galaxies. While two are obvious in this image, most orbit much farther away from Andromeda's core, and thus are out of frame. More like those submarines, are probably there too, just extremely difficult to detect.
Our own Milky Way has somewhere between 18 and 60 satellite galaxies depending on whether you still count those that are already mostly digested like food in so many vacuoles of a giant amoeba that is our Milky Way Galaxy. It appears that galaxies grow as they engulf their satellite galaxies or merge with full-sized galaxies. The Andromeda Galaxy is the closest full-sized and independent galaxy to the Milky Way at only 2.5 million light years away.
In a BIG telescope with a wide field of view, you can see those two brightest satellite galaxies of Andromeda plainly. Also look for how the its core is surrounded with two ringlets of galactic arms, recognizable by their central black ribbons of lumpy darkness. Normally, galactic arms take on a spiral pattern as they extend into the core. It’s assumed that Andromeda lost her figure-skater figure after having adsorbed another large galaxy or two. What’s known for certain, and nobody can do anything about it, is that she is coming for us next.
She is even bigger than our galaxy and we are on a convergent course with a closing velocity of ~180,000 miles per hour. Don't worry, Andromeda will never in your lifetime appear as big in the sky as it will in this art hanging on your wall. That's because even at that phenomenal speed, it will be 4 billion years before our galaxies start to merge -- plenty of time to amass a collection of Dark Ranger Telescope Astro Art.
Andromeda Galaxy
Andromeda Galaxy is the closest independent galaxy to the Milky Way at only 2.5 million light years away. It is simultaneously the largest and most distant object any unaided human eye will ever see – unless you know somebody with exceptional good transportation. This means if your sky is dark enough, you don’t even need the assistance of a telescope to detect Andromeda. If you can find the constellation Cassiopeia which is almost always in the northern sky (while in the northern hemisphere) due to its circumpolar location (rotating close to the North Pole), you can find this gray disc-shaped smudge in a dark night sky. First note that Cassiopeia, the letter W or M looking constellation, depending on whether it’s above or below Polaris, is a little lopsided. Before we go looking for the galaxy you need to know some Hawaiian first. Make a fist but leave you thumb and little outstretched as far you can. This gesture is called the shaka and if you point it to the sky as far as you arm can reach, it measures 25 degrees, thumb-tip to “pinky”-tip. Say “Hang lose bruh!” if you need to, but now you are ready to find that galaxy. Start with the more symmetrical and deeper half of Cassiopeia and bisect that V-shape, drawing your line through the apex, continuing on for one hang-loose gesture. There you’ll find the little smudge of Andromeda.
That smudge is only the galaxy’s core. If you could see the whole galaxy, it would be six full moons in diameter across the sky. The “arms” that form the rest of Andromeda’s disc are too faint for the human eye. They are also invisible to most telescopes because they get hidden behind the glare of that bright core. This problem of contrast ratios is routinely experienced when driving on a dark highway (as they ALL should be). Nothing can be seen of an oncoming vehicle itself due to the brightness of their headlights shining in your eyes.
In a BIG telescope with a wide field of view, you have extra darkness on the margins of the eyepiece, creating a more gradual contrast, you can see the whole galaxy! Andromeda’s core is surrounded with two ringlets of galactic arms, recognizable by their central black ribbons of lumpy darkness. Normally, galactic arms take on a spiral pattern as they extend into the core. It’s assumed that Andromeda lost her figure-skater figure after having adsorbed another large galaxy or two. What’s known for certain, and nobody can do anything about it, is that she is coming for us next.
She is even bigger than our galaxy and we are on a convergent course with a closing velocity of ~180,000 miles per hour. Don't worry, Andromeda will never in your lifetime appear as big in the sky as it will in this art hanging on your wall. That's because even at that phenomenal speed, it will be 4 billion years before our galaxies start to merge -- plenty of time to amass a collection of Dark Ranger Telescope Astro Art.
Star Clusters
The Double Star Cluster
7,000 light years away from Earth and about 500 light years away from each other, are the two clusters of stars known as The Double Star Cluster. In dark sky, the human eye can detect them as a brighter smudge standing out against the northern section of the Milky Way. In reality these two star clusters are not actually with us in Orion Arm of our galaxy, but instead shining through from the larger Perseus Arm where it warps around us at even a greater distance from the Milky Way’s core than we are. Confused? You aren’t the only one! Imagine a couple of fleas arguing about what kind of dog they are on. That’s been astronomers’ challenge in mapping the Milky Way, until the European Space Agency (ESA) sent their spacecraft Gaia to Earth’s Lagrange Point #2. Long before James Webb Space Telescope was sent to that same vantage point, Gaia has been there since 2014 precisely measuring and remeasuring the distance to over 1 billion stars to also calculate their exact motion. Thanks to Gaia we know more about the geography of our galaxy than most Americans do their own planet. The trouble with galactic mapping is that it’s a three-dimensional problem. Let’s keep it simple for now and revert to the ancient technique of pretending constellations are two-dimensional patterns. Now we say The Double Star Cluster halfway between the constellations Cassiopeia and Perseus, and find it there.
The stars that make up constellations are all of different ages and different distances and have no relation to one another except that we humans have connected these same stars with imaginary lines for millennia. All stars begin in star clusters. Like so many siblings, they are born in the same place, from huge clouds of dust and gas called star-birth nebulae. As more and more stars hatch from their cocoons, their combined outward flow of energy, known as stellar wind, pushes away the unused dust and gas revealing a cluster of stars.
As a star ages, it manufactures larger atoms by smashing together small ones. As that ratio changes from mostly hydrogen to increasing amounts helium, carbon, neon, oxygen, silicon, etc. the color of the light the star emits changes. From the color of stars astronomers can determine their relative age. New born stars are blue. They become just white when they in elementary school. Yellow stars like our Sun are in their high school and college years. Orange stars are middle aged. Red stars are senior citizens.
When those red stars run out of fuel they explode as supernovas, weakening the gravitational stability of the cluster causing their siblings on the edges to fall way into deep space. Eventually the entire star cluster falls apart. Those lucky few that wander into interesting alignments as viewed from Earth, get to be recognized as parts of constellations by us humans and apparently many species of migratory birds too.
Stars that are born big age much faster than their smaller siblings. The largest ones race through their entire life-cycle in only just a few million years, where smaller stars like our Sun live for billions of years. This is why the Double Star Cluster has a variety of colorful stars. Star color is subtle, like flavor is to La Croix. It's important to note that all stars are mostly white so what you should set your search image for is the extra tint of light present in addition to white. Astrophotography always reveals more information than the human eye can see through a telescope. This due to lots of biological reasons like, limited contrast ratios, too fast of refresh-rate for color rendition, etc. When showing off this colorful piece of Dark Ranger Telescope Astro Art to an ophthalmologist, they can elaborate. But if they get a little boring you can interrupt with what you've learned about stellar evolution.
Large Sagittarius Star Cloud
Really big congregations of star clusters that have lost their individual structure and mixed with each other, are known as star clouds. The Large Sagittarius Star Cloud is one of these regions often described as that steam coming out the constellation Sagittarius’s “teapot’s spout”. According to the ancient Greeks, Sagittarius depicts a centaur. But once a green laser wielding Dark Ranger has connected the dots to trace out a teapot, you’ll be hard pressed to visualize that pattern of stars any other way again. The star cloud itself is often referred as “the brightest section of the Milky Way.” That’s in part because all these stars are yellow and orange giant stars. While the star cloud is the first subject to catch your eye in this enigmatic scene, that is not the interesting structure captured in the piece of astrophotography.
This mosaic of five images also shows a close-up view of a small section the ribbon of darkness that runs throughout the middle of the Milky Way. It was originally misnamed as "the Great Rift" by astronomers of the 1800s (to this day astronomers continue to be terrible at naming things). Instead of being empty space, it's actually full space where the equilibrium between gravity and the galaxy's rotation, congregates dust and gas onto the galaxy’s plane of rotation. “Full space” is a misleading descriptor. While these regions can adsorb all the starlight in the optical wavelengths that tries to pass through them, it is not because of they are truly dense, but instead because they are enormous. We think of the air we breathe of being transparent yet it contains an astonishing 10 quintillion (19 zeros) molecules per cubic centimeter. In the other extreme, the densest of Milky Way’s dark regions only have a density 100,000 molecules / cm3. If our atmosphere was also 100s of light years thick, instead of merely a few 100 miles, it would be 13-orders of magnitude more opaque. Keep in mind the density difference between air and gold is only 6 orders of magnitude.
In the 1950s astronomers renamed these regions of galactic darkness “molecular clouds” which is technically more accurate but means nearly nothing since all clouds in Universe, not to mention all matter made when two or more atoms form a chemical bond are by definition molecules. Dark Rangers, who are better at correcting astronomer's misnomers, call these clouds of compressed dust and gas "Lumpy Darkness" as might anybody asked to describe this art.
The Milky Way is not the only galaxy that contains the vast dark lanes. For instance, the Andromeda Galaxy appears to be a featureless glow, earning the reputation for being one of the most disappointing objects you can see through a telescope because it looks nothing like what you would expect after having seen it via astrophotography. But if your sky is dark enough and your telescope is big enough, you can see thin arcs of darkness almost like parenthesis bracketing the galaxies core – those are Andromeda’s skinny ribbons of lumpy darkness. And once you recognize them for what they are, suddenly Andromeda start to look like something.
The Cigar Galaxy, with its edge on orientation, has very thick knots of the same darkness, indeed as thick as that galaxy’s rather plump disc is tall. Since lumpy darkness is the source material for bringing new stars into existence, it can be inferred that the Cigar Galaxy has billions of unborn stars in its reserves, far more then even big mama Andromeda.
Where good views of the Milky Way are still possible, you don't need astrophotography or even a telescope to recognize the difference in texture and hues of darkness when you compare the deep black lumpy darkness of the galaxy's plane to the smooth dark-grey of empty space. When these lumps of darkness are further contracted by the mutual gravity of their particles they can become star-birth nebulae. The pink and blue clouds in the upper left corner of this image are examples of these star forming regions, known as the Lagoon and Trifid Star-birth Nebulae.
If you hang this masterpiece of magnified Milky Way astrophotography on your wall it’s likely to mistaken for abstract art. Now you have to decide if it easier to play along with that misconception or try to explain to them what they are really looking at.
The Milky Way and our Telescopes
Ford and Arthur Under Orion
Starting in 1666, Isaac Newton experimented with prisms to understand how light could split into the rainbow spectrum and be recombined back into full-spectrum, white light. Newton also knew that rainbows were the bane of early telescopes. His hypothesis was that the design of lenses was to blame and he proved himself correct by building a new kind of telescope where mirrors did the majority of the work. His 1668 prototype telescope was only 7” long and used a 2” diameter bronze mirror, yet it nevertheless provided rainbow-free views and enough clarity to show four Galilean moons orbiting Jupiter. His second and third telescopes were slightly larger, but by 1792, Newton had proven his point and moved onto calculus and other pursuits.
To this day, the Newtonian Telescope is still favored by both professional and amateur astronomers alike. It blends the wide-field views of modern refractors (long and skinny, all-lenses telescopes) and high-power magnification of the short and girthy catadioptric telescopes where both mirrors and lenses are used. If you want one telescope that can do it all, get a Newtonian. The Hubble Space Telescope is a Newtonian, as is Ford, the telescope in the foreground.
All the telescopes of Dark Ranger Telescope Tours are named for characters and things from Douglas Adam's 5-part Trilogy, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Ford Prefect, a researcher for that wholly remarkable book, who, while visiting Earth, takes the name for a model of car misnamed high above its actual performance status, thinking that would help him blend in among the humans. Ford is the eponym for this 12" Skywatcher Newtonian Telescope, because like Ford, who becomes Arthur Dent's (whose namesake telescope is in the background) most trusted traveling companion across space and time, this Ford can also travel both far and wide. To put it another way, most telescopes can only look at one tiny spec of sky at a time, for example zooming in on the Orion Nebula, the middle smudge of the sword that hangs from Orion’s belt. After Ford has shown you that stunning view of stars being born, you can switch to low-power eyepiece and this same scope could show you an entire star cluster, which is the next step in stellar evolution. A classic star cluster is Pleiades Star Cluster – described in the mythology by many cultures as being maidens. Orion, for nefarious reasons, has already chased the group of young ladies out of the frame of this astro art. Nevertheless, Ford could be pointed in their direction and reveal that instead of “7 Sisters” visible to the unaided eye, there are actually over 50 bright blue and white sibling stars in the group.
We won’t sell you our best buddy Ford, don’t even ask. But we can sell you small, medium, and large versions of the astro art he posed for. What’s more you can also buy an amazing picture, in any of those three sizes of the Pleiades Star Cluster we used Ford to image.
