My Current Top 10 Space Photos

Posted on August 9, 2025 by aknudson

Sorry to anyone that’s been coming for the space pictures, only to be swamped by the slew of leadership- and management-related posts. There should be only 2 more “previous” LinkedIn posts to move over here, and then I plan to have a weekly update focused on leadership & management, with the space posts happening “whenever there’s a clear night sky in Seattle” (so … yeah, who knows?).

But to keep the space people happy, and because I’ve wanted to do it for a while, here’s a post of my current top 10 space pictures, in no specific order. You can find all of these images in the Galaxies, Nebulae, or Solar System Objects pages (none of the star clusters made my top 10, but they’re nice! Go check ’em out!).

Let me know your favorite, or if you have any that you’d like me to revisit.

M33 – Triangulum Galaxy

2025-07-29

54m

The Triangulum is a great galaxy for the eVscope, because it’s large, distinct, and relatively bright. You can really see the different colors in the stars – some are red giants, others are blue hypergiants, and even others just appear white. If you have the time and a good clear night, spend an hour focused on this galaxy, and you’ll be happy with what you can capture.

M81 – Bode’s Galaxy

20m

2025-05-02

Bode’s is a great target, and really benefits from the color-stretching software update. The bright center really pops out, and the wide spirals are somewhat unique (at least for what you can get with an eVscope).

M101 – Pinwheel Galaxy

16m

2023-05-26

This is the one photo that literally made me jump for joy when I saw it. I’ve wanted to witness a supernova during my lifetime, and I got to catch one here! The bright star in the right-most arm of the Pinwheel Galaxy is a supernova that exploded a day or two before this photo. Go to the Galaxies page to see before & after photos, and you can clearly see the bright new star appearing, and then fading away over the ensuing months.

M104 – Sombrero Galaxy

70m

2025-05-04

The Sombrero is nice because it’s bright enough that you can get a reasonably good picture with a much shorter dwell time (5-10 minutes). But as with so many of these deep sky objects, if you can leave it running – like I did here, for 70 minutes – you can get even more striking images. I really like the sharp contrast between the bright core and the thick, light-obscuring dust on the edge of the galaxy.

NGC 0891

19m

2025-01-21

This is definitely in the top 3 for me. It’s so distinct, and so perfectly edge-on. Just like we have problems seeing things outside the Milky Way if they’re in line with (and therefore blocked by) our galactic plane, if there are any intelligent species in this galaxy, they almost certainly will never know that we exist, since we’re positioned perfectly along the plane of THEIR galaxy.

B33 – Horsehead Nebula

55m

2025-01-25

Another in my top 3, and I’ve rotated it 90 degrees to make the horse’s head upright. If you want to catch this one with your own telescope, you need a very clear night, a very long dwell time, and use the enhancement software. I love this photo.

M16 – Eagle Nebula

2025-07-29

22m

Anyone that’s seen the “Pillars of Creation” photo from the Hubble Telescope (or the updated one from the James Webb) can recognize those dark pillar-shaped splotches are in the middle of this nebula. And I got ’em! On my telescope! From my back yard! These are pillars of light-obscuring dust and gasses, and they are light-years tall. I love how you can clearly make out the three-dimensional nature of these massive clouds of gas and dust – the sky isn’t just a flat black sheet with flickering pinpricks of white light! It has depth, and color, and immeasurable beauty.

M20 – Trifid Nebula

16m

2025-05-30

The Trifid Nebula is actually three nebulae: a dense, red, emission nebula, a wispier blue reflection nebula, and a spiky, shadowy dark nebula in front. The VVT software update really makes this an excellent nebula for the eVscope to image. I really want to go back here on a clear night for a hour-plus dwell time, but I’ve not yet had the chance.

M27 – Dumbbell Nebula

25m

2025-07-18

The Dumbbell is a favorite for Unistellar enthusiasts, because of its distinct shape and colors. The red is mostly hydrogen gas, which was sprayed and ejected off of the roiling surface a massive star, as it went through its violent death throes. The blue is more abundant in oxygen, which was created in the star’s core, during last few seconds before it finally ran out of fuel and collapsed under its own incredible weight. It fused hydrogen, carbon, and neon into oxygen, silicon, and iron, and then exploded back out. The huge, expanding sphere of ionized oxygen gas (plus dust and other stuff) chased the hydrogen that was burped out during the previous years or centuries, creating … this!

Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks

2m

2024-03-15

I have captured several comets, but I like this one the best, because of its rare blue-green color. This is before the color stretching software launched; I wonder what it would’ve been like with it turned on. The green is apparently “dicarbon,” which is what it sounds like: two carbons, in a single molecule. It’s rare on Earth because it’s quite reactive, but on this comet, warmed by the sun and in the depths of space, exploding chunks or rock and ice, and outgassing water and dust, it’s apparently unusually abundant.

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Amazon’s RTO SNAFU

Posted on August 9, 2025 by aknudson

Another previous post from LinkedIn, archived here. This originally was posted to LinkedIn on July 21, 2025.

To be clear, I’m not saying Amazon’s RTO mandate was a bad decision. I’m saying they never showed anyone why it was a good one.

I’ve often said Amazon is a data-driven, evidence-based company. We collect information objectively, discuss it, test it, verify it, and then the data will tell us the right thing to do. We make two-way door decisions quickly, but are diligent when making one-way door decisions.

RTO was a one-way door. Once you tell people “come back or you’re fired,” you can’t really take it back.

Therefore, I expected Amazon to back up their decision with evidence. But when AWS CEO Matt Garman said, “nine out of 10 Amazon employees he’d spoken with were ‘actually quite excited by this change,’” or “when we want to really, really innovate on interesting products, I have not seen an ability for us to do that when we’re not in person,” he didn’t provide any data to back it up. (Unless “nine out of ten people he’d spoken with” has a p-value under .05? Probably not.) And then Andy Jassy, in his RTO announcement, said “the advantages of being together in the office are significant,” without providing any actual evidence. These showed that the decision was more important to them than the data.

But then there’s Gartner Research [https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/the-data-is-in-return-to-office-mandates-aren-t-worth-the-talent-risks], who showed that RTO mandates didn’t improve performance. And for some people, in-person work stifles productivity. Or people reported higher feelings of inclusion in a remote work environment. Or that managers saw the greatest benefits from RTO mandates.

Wait… managers saw the most benefit? Like in the study by Ding and Ma in December 2023 [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4675401, https://www.businessinsider.com/rto-policies-dont-improve-employee-performance-company-value-controlling-bosses-2024-1], that observed: “[r]esults of our determinant analyses are consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance.”? And based on their data, they could “report significant declines in employees’ job satisfactions mandates but no significant changes in financial performance or firm values after RTO mandates”?

Wait. “[N]o significant changes in […] firm values after RTO mandates.” Firm values, like, Leadership Principles? So there’s data saying we’re not better at invent & simplify if we’re in the office?

So on the one hand, we have Amazon executives insisting that “our culture” is about working in an office, and that we’re not innovating if we’re not in the office, and that there are “significant advantages” to being in the office, because …REASONS. And on the other hand, there are research papers with observable, measurable, verifiable data that says … not that?

Again, I’m not saying RTO is a bad decision. I’m just saying that Amazon never showed any evidence of evidence-based decision making while making it.

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Leaving Amazon

Posted on August 9, 2025 by aknudson

The first post I made on LinkedIn was my goodbye post, announcing that I was leaving Amazon, with a few comments as to why. I was surprised when it got nearly 250,000 impressions, over 1,500 reactions, and 150 comments. It’s the closest I’ve ever had to anything going viral.

After 17 years and 9 months, today is my last day at Amazon.

The belt hook is from the Retail Pricing DICE (Diversity and Inclusion Career Event), which I proudly planned, organized, and ran back in 2019. Before that, my belt hook had the AWE logo – Amazon Women in Engineering. I’ve always been an advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion. So when Amazon publicly announced they were abandoning their DEI programs in a craven capitulation to the Orange Taco, the question changed from “if” to “when.”

Unfortunately, Amazon’s become a Day 2 company. Senior leadership has ditched developing the best and customer obsession for profits and politics. And they never lived up to their promise to become one of Earth’s best employers.

What’s next? Well, I’ve made a LOT of money during may career by making other people a TON of money. My goal for the future is to make enough money doing something that makes the world a better place. I’m not sure yet what that means, but I know I can’t do that at Amazon. For now, I’m going to spend the summer with my family and exploring my options. You can see the results of one of my hobbies on http://www.arneknudson.com, where I’ve uploaded all the photos I’ve taken using my digital telescope.

The people that I got to work with, mentor, and learn from at Amazon remain some of the smartest and best people I’ve known. I’m proud of my accomplishments and will always treasure the great relationships I got to make. And I got to live in Europe for 4 years! I have no regrets, and I’m grateful for the opportunities, but I am sad about what Amazon’s become.

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Increasing the Scope

Posted on August 9, 2025 by aknudson

As mentioned in the about page, I’m not only an amateur / hobbyist astronomer with a high-tech telescope, I’m also a software professional. I graduated with a computer science degree back in the mid-90’s, and pretty quickly got into management. I’ve been a software manager / leader for more than 25 years, and many of those were with Amazon (almost 18).

I’m no longer at Amazon, but I’ve started writing about my thoughts and experiences. To date, I’ve mostly been posting on LinkedIn, but I’ve decided to start archiving them here, as well. That means, about once a week, there’s going to be a post about leadership, management, my experiences (and displeasure) with Amazon, and what I think others could learn from those experiences. I’ll still update this site each time I have new and interesting photos from the telescope, and I’ll keep categorizing those as “Space on the Back Porch” – you can select just the pretty space pictures by finding the “Categories” section on the right side of the page, and choosing that header. And the individual pages for Galaxies, Nebulae, and so on will also stay.

It means there’s going to be a spate of posts – basically, the first 5 that I’ve already posted on LinkedIn. But after that, you should expect about one a week. I’ll probably put all five of them up over the weekend.

The leadership posts will have a different category title. For now, I’ve called it “Being a Good Leader,” because that’s pretty much what I want to write about. I could try to stick with the theme and call it something like “Speaking From the Front Porch,” but that’s kind of corny. I do like the idea that “space on the back porch” also implies making room for people and welcoming them in, like at a barbecue. Sharing thoughts over a beer, chatting about whatever, and enjoying the company. So I’m going to keep the overall title for the site (at least for now).

Let me know if you have thoughts or ideas. Everyone is welcome here, and I’m glad you came! Pull up a chair, grab a beverage of your choice, and let’s chat.

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New Solar System Objects: Blue Angels!

Posted on July 31, 2025 by aknudson

Every summer, the Blue Angels perform in Seattle at SeaFair. For those that don’t know, the Blue Angels are the US Navy’s acrobatic flight team, and they perform all over the world. When in Seattle, they fly over Lake Washington, which I can see from my back porch. I set up the eVscope this afternoon to try to catch them during practice, and as I suspected, it was really hard. The eVscope has a fixed and limited field of view, it’s slow to move, and the screen refresh rate is probably 5-10 frames per second. They’re in and out of your field of view in 3-4 frames, so you have to watch, click, and pray. I took 22 pictures this afternoon, got planes in 12 of them, and the only ones where they’re any good are below. Still, it was fun to capture them with the telescope!

Also, to get these, I had to manually adjust the gain and brightness, and the telescope had the annoying habit of occasionally (and apparently randomly) switching back to automatic mode – which entirely blacked out the screen, as it reset both to effectively 0. That forced another half-dozen clicks as I had to go to the adjustment screen, switch back to manual mode, and adjust the sliders to be able to see anything.

To capture the photos below, I picked a spot near the horizon where I knew they often flew past, found it in the telescope, and then watched for when they approached. As they did, I started watching my phone screen, and as soon as I saw them, I clicked to take a photo. Sometimes I was early, but usually I was late.

Blue Angels

2025-07-31

snapshot

Seafair 2025 practice

Blue Angels

2025-07-31

snapshot

Seafair 2025 practice

Blue Angels

2025-07-31

snapshot

Seafair 2025 practice

Blue Angels

2025-07-31

snapshot

Seafair 2025 practice

Blue Angels

2025-07-31

snapshot

Seafair 2025 practice

Blue Angels

2025-07-31

snapshot

Seafair 2025 practice

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Revisiting Some Favorites, And a New Nebula

Posted on July 31, 2025 by aknudson

I had a clear night a couple nights ago, without high clouds, and decided to give it a go. I was happy with what I captured!

The first image is a new object (for me) – the Little Dumbbell Nebula. The Dumbbell (M27) is a favorite for the eVscope in the northern hemisphere, given its size, brightness, and clarity. The Little Dumbbell (M76) is much smaller in terms of visual angle, and dimmer, but still has distinct red and yellow elements.

The other three were revisits to previous favorites – the Eagle Nebula, with its spectacular Pillars of Creation clearly visible; NGC 0891, a wonderful edge-on galaxy with distinct dust clouds and a bright central bulge; and the Triangulum galaxy, a face-on diffuse spiral galaxy with beautiful red-, yellow-, and blue-colored stars. It’s the largest galaxy we can see that fits in the eVscope field of view. The Andromeda galaxy is larger, but would need approximately a dozen images stitched together in a mosaic. It’s weird to think that the Triangulum is almost as big as a full moon, but we can’t see it, since it’s so dim. It’s also weird to think that there are nocturnal animals, with vision much better than ours, that CAN see it, just hanging there, in the night sky.

These will be added to the nebulae and galaxies pages.

M76 – The Little Dumbbell Nebula

2025-07-29

26m

Not a great shot, when compared to what’s available online, but still, a nice color photo of a small and distant nebula. I suspect this might be better with a darker sky, from a higher elevation, but from within a city? Pretty dang good.

M16 – Eagle Nebula

2025-07-29

22m

Another fantastic shot, including the Pillars of Creation. This is one of the best nebulae that you can capture with the eVscope.

NGC 0891

2025-07-29

25m

I still love this galaxy – it’s almost perfect in terms of size, brightness, and clarity for the eVscope.

M33 – Triangulum Galaxy

2025-07-29

54m

I wanted to get a really long dwell time on the Triangulum, to get the dim glow of the diffuse arms, and to really highlight the bright giant stars in its arms. I love the different colors you can clearly make out.

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I Tried To Catch a Saturnian Eclipse…

Posted on July 21, 2025 by aknudson

Unfortunately, it didn’t work out very well.

On July 18th, Titan passed between Saturn and the Sun, casting a shadow over the Saturnian cloud tops. Unistellar pitched this on their website as a viewing opportunity, and I figured, what the heck? Let’s give it a go. The Jupiter eclipse by Io was… okay? I knew that Saturn was both smaller and further away, but since Titan was relatively large, I thought maybe I could see it.

I set up to start taking pictures around 08:30 GMT (1:30am PDT), and took pictures at 08:28, 08:33, 09:10, 09:12, 09:13, 09:31, 09:32, and 09:54. Unfortunately, they were all pretty much the same, and came out like the one below.

Saturn

snapshot

2025-07-18

An attempt to capture Titan casting a shadow on Saturn. Unfortunately, the resolution isn’t high enough to make out the details.

I tried dwell times of 10s, 20s, 30s, 4m, and even one that was about 20m. In truth, the best ones came at around 20 seconds – much shorter, and there were no details; much longer, and everything washed out into a blobby orange haze. None came out any better than the one above, which was the best of the bunch. You can’t make out any shadow from Titan, and you can barely make out the rings. I started to make a movie of the images, but once I imported them and started aligning them, I just gave up, because there just wasn’t anything to see.

I confirmed, again, what I’ve mentioned before – the Unistellar eVscope2 is a phenomenal telescope for capturing moon-sized dim objects like nebulae and galaxies, even within an urban environment. It’s a good telescope for capturing star clusters. But it’s not good at the solar system objects, given both the limitation on field size and an inability to zoom. And unless you’re really into post-processing and stitching your images (which I’ve not yet attempted), it’s not good for large objects like the Milky Way or the Andromeda Galaxy.

Since I didn’t want the evening to be a total loss, I did get a shot of the Dumbbell Nebula, which I thought came out quite well:

M27 – Dumbbell Nebula

25m

2025-07-18

I caught this the same night I was (unsuccessfully) attempting to capture Titan casting a shadow on Saturn. This was the best photo I took that night, unfortunately.

I did get the telescope out a few other times in the past couple weeks. We had a lot of nighttime high haze and thin clouds, as is common in Seattle in the summer, and so my telescope kept failing shots after only a few minutes. I did get two photos that I thought were worthy of posting:

M17 – Omega Nebula

10m

2025-07-10

A nice shot of the Omega Nebula, but it was cut short at only 10 minutes of dwell time due to high clouds.

NGC 6946

23m

2025-07-18

I wanted to revisit NGC 6946, to see whether the color stretching was bad in the first one, or it really is that red of a galaxy. Turns out, it’s really that red!

The last one was actually the night after the Saturn attempt – but Saturn was around 2:00 in the morning, whereas the photo of NGC 6946 was taken around 11pm the next evening.

All the above will be added to the Galaxies, Nebulae, and Solar System Objects pages as appropriate.

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Maybe my new favorite picture

Posted on July 1, 2025 by aknudson

It’s been clear the last few nights, and I got some new photos. The first night I focused on galaxies that I’d not yet captured, and I got two new ones that are part of a cluster of galaxies referred to as the NGC 4631 group. All are part of the larger Virgo Cluster, but these four are part of a group that may be as few as five galaxies or as many as twenty-seven, all interacting with and orbiting each other. The ones that I’ve captured are close together – just beyond the viewable angle of my telescope, so about two or three moon-widths apart.

The second night, I first revisited an old friend – the Trifid Nebula. My shot got interrupted by high clouds, unfortunately, but it was good enough to post. After that, I decided to try a new one (for me): the Eagle Nebula, and boy, that one’s a winner with the eVscope. It’s definitely a new member of the top 3 best shots I’ve taken, and might be my new favorite. The detail in the nebula is amazing. The eagle-eyed among you may recognize the “Pillars of Creation,” made famous by the Hubble telescope. It’s amazing to me that I can, with a small-ish telescope on the back porch of my home, capture an image that includes these same pillars, in the detail and vibrancy that I have.

These images have been added to the Galaxies and Nebulae pages.

NGC 4631 (and NGC 4627)

29m

2025-06-29

Also called the Whale Galaxy due to its shape, this is part of the “NGC 4631 group,” which is then a part the Virgo cluster. NGC 4627 is a dwarf elliptical galaxy, and it’s the smudge just to the right of the galactic center. These two form a galaxy pair, meaning they are bound to each other and are in the process of colliding (and then combining).

NGC 4656 and 4657

25m

2025-06-30

Also called the Hockey Stick Galaxies, these strongly interacting galaxies are in the middle of a massive collision which will warp and reshape them over the next few hundred million years. These are very faint, and even a long exposure with the eVscope couldn’t get much detail.

M20 – Trifid Nebula

4m

2025-06-30

It surprises me that I can get such bright colors with only a 4 minute exposure. High clouds interrupted this shot, unfortunately.

M16 – Eagle Nebula

18m

2025-07-01

After the first minute or two, this was only a dull red blotch. Even so, I decided to leave it running, and when I came back 15 minutes later, was blown away. Zoom in on the center of this image, and note the detail in the clouds. Those pillars are light-years tall. And I can take a picture of them from my back porch. Maybe my new favorite picture with the eVscope 2.

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A couple revisits, a couple new ones

Posted on June 18, 2025 by aknudson

Despite the high clouds, I made another attempt a couple nights ago. Unfortunately, most of my long exposures got interrupted, and so I got two good images and one mediocre image. On the plus side, the mediocre one has 2 galaxies in it, so maybe it’s twice as mediocre! All of these have been added to the Galaxies page.

M65 and M66

8m

2025-06-16

These are two of the three in the Leo Triplet, which also includes NGC 3628. Not a great night; I took 6 shots and all but one got interrupted due to high clouds. This was one that got interrupted. NGC 3628 remains the best of these three.

NGC 4244

30m

2025-06-17

The diffuse dust, lack of a distinctive central bulge, relatively dim stars in this one makes for a vague, cotton-like appearance.

NGC 4565

24m

2025-06-17

Also referred to as the Needle Galaxy, this edge-on spiral galaxy has a strong dust band with a bright, spherical core.

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A night for new objects

Posted on June 9, 2025 by aknudson

I wanted to capture some new things last night. Unfortunately, the high clouds kept ruining the tracking, so there’s about 4-5 photos that were 60 seconds or less, which I’m not even going to bother uploading. All my shots ended up with the “enhanced vision disrupted” message; the longest I got was 27 minutes. The ones I kept, below, have been added to the star cluster and galaxy pages.

M5

13m

2025-06-09

This cluster’s core is so bright that it can sometimes be mistaken for a faint star by the naked eye.

M10

6m

2025-06-09

A nice little cluster, the bright core of stars is only 35 light-years across.

M94 – Cat’s Eye Galaxy

27m

2025-06-09

M94 is sometimes known as the Cat’s Eye Galaxy or the Croc’s Eye Galaxy, but it’s just M94 in the Unistellar catalog. I think this is one that could really benefit from a very dark night, from a high elevation, with no humidity. I was 0 for 3 last night, but still got a relatively nice image.

M98

14m

2025-06-09

Not a bad little spiral galaxy. The relatively short dwell time, high clouds, and three-quarters moon created a pretty poorly resolved image. Probably worth a re-visit.

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