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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