The pictures on this thread are amazing..... some double....but nonetheless awesome.
I don't know how many contributors actually are amateur astonomers, but once you've seen an object in real life...... pictures like these mean a lot more.
Some of my favorites include M42-The Orion Nebula, M31-Andromeda Galaxy, M33-The Triangulum Galaxy, M1-Supernova remnants (The Crab Nebula), M45-The Pleiades Cluster (Subaru Cluster), M2-A Globular cluster near the constellation Aquarius containing 150,000+ stars.....
These are only objects listed in Messier's catalog which goes up to M110 ( I think). Messier worked when technology was obviously nowhere near ours today...... He was a comet hunter in the 1700s that was frustrated he could't find any. So he cataloged several objects he thought looked similar, yet weren't the same. His catalog was ment to be nebulae and clusters...yet many turned out to be galaxies.
The New General Catalog (NCG) has 8,000 or so objects in it.... including Messier's and another.... The Index Catalog (IC) that contains only nebulae and clusters. HOwever, the NGC is the most comprehensive, by far.
http://seds.org/messier/Messier.html
http://www.ngcic.org/dss/dss_messier.asp<< this one
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NGC_objects
^^^^ Check these out!!!!^^^^