The following several images were observed with the VATT in October 2001 by Matt Nelson, Chris Corbally, Aileen O'Donoghue, and docents from Discovery Park, Safford, Arizona. The seeing conditions were 0.8 arcseconds and the field was about 6 arcseconds square. Nelson processed these near real-color images from 3-color data.

Dumbell Nebula
Like other planetary nebula, M27 is a bubble of gas that has been ejected by a star at the end of its life. The core of the star still remains in the center and makes this bubble of gas glow. M27 is estimated to be 3,500 years old and perhaps 1,000 light years away.

NGC 6781
This is another planetary nebula, the ejected gas bubble from a star. That central star is more easily seen than in the Dumbell Nebula. It is the slightly bluish star right in the middle of the bubble. This nebula sits in the part of the Milky Way that goes through Aquila, a summer time constellation for the northern hemisphere.

Ring Nebula
This planetary nebula, also known as M57, is probably the best known. Hubble Space Telescope images indicate that we are looking down the barrel, as it were, of a gun. Some barrel, for it is about 4000 light years away and 500 times the diameter of our solar system.

M56
This Globular Cluster is in the constellation of Lyra like the Ring Nebula. For Charles Messier, discovering it in 1779, it seemed "without stars, having little light." This modern picture from VATT shows there are in fact countless, jewel-like stars, which were all born from a common giant cloud of gas and dust. The brighter, yellower ones were more massive initially and so evolved faster into "yellow giant" stars than the fainter, bluer ones.

NGC 7479 (visible) A spiral galaxy, with a central bar, showing bluish knots of new-forming stars in its arms. The knots are blue from the predominance of very hot, young stars in them. Compare this image with the one to the right, taken in the near-infrared. NGC 7479 is in the constellation of Pegasus and about 105 million light years away.

NGC 7479 (infrared) A 10-minute exposure through a near-infrared filter (the K band) made with the Arcetri Infrared Camera (ARNICA). The scale is 0.5 arcsec/pixel and the field of view about 2 arcminutes. Taken on Oct 31, 1996, by L. Vanzi and G.P. Tozzi. The central bar and the inner structure of this spiral galaxy are well-shown by this infrared picture.

M33 Galaxy
This picture shows the core of a companion spiral galaxy to the Andromeda galaxy M31. The full galaxy spreads about eight times larger, but it is smaller than both our Milky Way galaxy and the even larger Andromeda galaxy. However, at about 3 million light years distant, it is probably the furthest object capable of being seen by the naked eye. A telescope-aided image does reward us with much detail of its stars and dark gas lanes.
This picture, taken and processed by Matt Nelson, is a composite of 13 B filter and 6 V filter images, each with 2 minute exposure time. The last image was at a zenith distance of less than 2 degrees from the zenith, a real test of tracking for an alt-azimuth telescope like VATT.

Asteroid Pholus passing NGC 5964
In May 2003, Steve Tegler (NAU) and Guy Consolmagno used the VATT to observe the unusual asteroid/comet nucleus 5145 Pholus, and one night it happened to be passing by the galaxy NGC 5964.
Note that, like the picture of Abel 397 above, they took three separate images in red, green, and blue, and then combined them to make this image; but since Pholus was moving between images, it appears as a rainbow "streak" in the image. Tegler did the image processing.

NGC 628 (R-band) A spiral galaxy at a distance of 9.7 Mpc (32 million light years). It was taken by Vatican Observatory astronomer José Funes, S.J. and Sanae Akiyama with the University of Arizona. The images, obtained at the VATT in November 2001, illustrate the H-alpha survey of star formation in the local universe. The R-band image is at left; the H-alpha image at right. The H-alpha image reveals those regions where stars are forming.

NGC 628 (H-alpha) See description to left.

The following three images were observed in a V (yellow-orange) filter by Richard P. Boyle and Austin Tomaney on Jan 31, 1995, They were among the images taken during the first scientific observing run at VATT, and they were taken with the Columbia University CCD camera, having an 11 arc minute field of view.

Spiral galaxy NGC 2903
a 400-second exposure o this home for 100 billion or more stars. It is fairly similar to our own Milky Way galaxy, though ours lacks such a prominent central bar.

M3, the Globular Cluster
a 100-second exposure of a collection of stars in a ball more than 200 light years in diameter and 40,000 light years from Earth. This cluster is made up of perhaps as many as half a million stars, held together by mutual gravitational attraction since their formation some 10 billion to 15 billion years ago.