Deven's Astrophotography GALLERY

Deven's Astrophotography GALLERYDeven's Astrophotography GALLERYDeven's Astrophotography GALLERY

Deven's Astrophotography GALLERY

Deven's Astrophotography GALLERYDeven's Astrophotography GALLERYDeven's Astrophotography GALLERY
  • Home
  • Gallery (V2) (WIP)

The Flaming Star Nebula, IC 405

Exploring the Flaming Star Nebula: The Central Core

The Flaming Star Nebula is powered by a runaway star, AE Aurigae. Interestingly, this star was ejected from the Orion Nebula's Trapezium cluster. The star is barreling through the gas seen in this nebula, ionizing it brightly and carving intricate filaments as it moves. These filaments, seen in bright pink, are shaped by the stellar winds of the star and glow from ionized hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur.

Detail seen near the central star, the brightest star in this frame. These filaments mark chaos zones where many stellar forces are interacting with gas at once. Some filaments here, near the bottom, may also be comprised of cold interstellar dust, as they seem to darken the field behind them.

The Wake

The long tail of the Flaming Star is much more diffuse than the core region. This gas has had time to settle after the central star plowed through over hundreds of thousands of years. You can observe how the gas becomes less and less structured as you move from right to left, away from the core. Some of the fainter gas is illuminated via reflected starlight.

How I Captured This Image

Capturing the Images

Firstly, I captured many images of this subject, with a monochrome astronomy camera. To create a color image, I use many different filters and then map the images through each filter to red, green, and blue. For this image, I captured broadband 30-second exposures of red (15), green(15), and blue(15), and narrowband 300-second exposures of Hydrogen-alpha(24), Sulfur-II(47), and Oxygen-III(47). This gives a total of 10 hours, 12 minutes for all filters.

Processing the Images

I processed this image in the program PixInsight. I extracted sky backgrounds for every image. Then, I combined each filter's data to create a color image. Afterwards, I did several adjustments including a "histogram stretch" to massively brighten the gas. Other adjustments include contrast, saturation, and adjusting various blending of the images. This image in particular, including the gas itself, is a blend of RGB and narrowband SHO data.

Challenges

This image was taken over two frigid nights. My equipment was nowhere near its low temperature limit, however, I was. Additionally, this image was intended to be a single-night project however I decided that it needed more, since there was a large amount of noise present especially in the Oxygen-III data.


Powered by

You can decline this cookie popup.

GoDaddy has some default cookies (how many people visit my website) that I really don't care about, so feel free to decline this.

DeclineAcccept