IC410 - The Tadpoles Nebula in Auriga

This is IC410, imaged a few nights ago.
 
IC410 is a dusty emission nebula located in the constellation of Auriga at about 12,000 lightyears from Earth. It is part of a larger star forming region that also contains the Flaming Star Nebula.
 
The gas structures in this image are lit by the radiation from the open star cluster NGC1893 that lies in the centre of the nebula. This star cluster is about 4 million years old, but in astronomical terms it is still very young, with hot, massive stars.
 
At the bottom-left of the star cluster, two more dense structures are visible. These are similar to the famous Pillar of Creation and they are composed of dust and gas leftover from the formation of the star cluster and are very likely to give birth to more stars in the future. As can be seen in the image, these structures point away from the centre of the nebula; this is because of the stellar winds and radiation pressure from the stars in NGC 1893.
 
Due to these structure's shape, the nebula is often referred to as the Tadpoles Nebula.
 
This image was created by adopting the Hubble false-colour palette for mapping narrowband emissions from Sulphur, Hydrogen Alpha and Oxygen atoms to the red, green and blue channels respectively. So, the cyan/blue colours are the Hydrogen Alpha , with the yellow/green colours representing the Sulphur and the pale blue representing the Oxygen.
 
Imaged over two nights, with just under 7 hours of total integration time.
36x5mins Ha, 20x5mins Sii, 24x5mins Oiii, plus Darks Flats and Bias frames. Stacked and processed in PixInsight, with final colour balancing in Photoshop.

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