Finished Working On My Photo Of The Hors Head.

This is the Crescent nebula it is located in the constellation Cygnus. This nebula is the result of the center star first becoming a red supergiant and ejecting some of its outer layers of gas in space, that gas cloud was then shaped into a bubble by the stellar winds emitted by the central star when it later turned into a Wolf–Rayet star.

The resulting gas bubble is heated and ionised by both the UV rays edited by the start and the stellar winds causing it to glow. Wolf-Rayet stars are the final step of some of the most massive stars before they explode into supernovas. In the case of the crescent nebula, the central star is expected to go supernova within the next few hundred thousand years (We probably still have quite a bit of time left before we observe that).

When a star goes supernova, some of the matter that composed the star is blasted off into space at extremely high velocities (up to 10% of the speed of light). This matter will then slowly (few hundred to a few tens of thousand of years) slow-down and cool-down to for me vast clouds of interstellar dust and gas. This second photo is a part of such a gas cloud, the veil nebula (the center of the western veil, also known as C34). In short, this is the photo of what's left of the corpse of a star that exploded about 10 to 20 thousand years ago.

Picture of the bubble nebula and surrounding objects : Top left (the vague group of stars): M52 an open cluster

Center right: NGC 7538 an emission nebula (also known as the northern lagoon nebula)

Bottom center: NGC 7635/the bubble nebula and the surrounding hydrogen cloud

The ''bubble'' part of this nebula is created by the stellar wind (flow of gas, plasma and particle) emitted by the central star at nearly 650 million km/h hitting and compressing the surrounding interstellar gas. The central star (BD +602522) is currently estimated to be about 45 times heavier than our sun and about 4 million years old. Being so massive and thus very hot (it's a type O star) its lifespan is very limited for a star and it should go supernova in about 10 to 20 million years.

BD +602522 is slightly off center from the bubble, this is due to the interstellar gas being a bit more dense on one side and thus slowing the stellar wind more efficiently.

Single exposure to make the central star more visible.

Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera. 12x300s image for each colour filter (LRGB) and 12x300s for the Ha filter, total imaging time 5h, stacking and processing done in PixInsight.

Starless version of the same image:

Older image where the bubble is more distinct from the background hydrogen clouds :

Photo of the NGC 2237, the Rosette nebula and the star cluster inside it, NGC 2244.

The star cluster, which is estimated to be about 5 million years old, is responsible for the ionisation of the surrounding gas. The mass of the nebula is estimated to be about 10 000 times the mass of our sun, which is relatively massive for a diffuse nebula.

This image uses a SHO palette, I quite like the colours I manage to get, both as the normal and starless images.

I also tried using the Foraxx palette, I think it's a bit less interesting visually, but the dark dust structures seam a bit more visible.

(Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera ZWO LRGB filters and Baader 6.5nm SHO filter. 5x120s image for each colour filter (RGB), 15x300s for the Ha filter 20x300s for the SII filter and 18x300s for the OIII filter, total imaging time 4h 25min, stacking and processing done in PixInsight.)

sometimes astronomy camera companies will post about their horrible attempts to fix hardware problems with software. normally these are unremarkable.

and then sometimes they contain a beautiful single sentence that will live in your brain forever

Perseus double cluster, had still some time left at the end of the night after the main sequence of photos and before dawn so I took the opportunity to capture about 25 minutes of photos of the double cluster. This is a pair of open clusters of stars (NGC 884 left and NGC 869 right), both are composed mostly of young blue giants and a few red giants in NGC 884. Both clusters have most likely formed from a single gas cloud and are only separated by a few hundred light years. This pair of cluster is relatively bright and can be viewed with the naked eye or a pair of binoculars in dark locations, in those cases, the clusters appear as nebulous region, with a couple of stars resolved with binoculars.

“the arts and sciences are completely separate fields that should be pitted against each other” the overlap of the arts and sciences make up our entire perceivable reality they r fucking on the couch

Photo of NGC 7000 / the North American nebula (southern part), the bright star on the top left corner is ξ Cygni. Might rework it later since this one still has a bit too much gradient/haze due to the full moon when I took the photos. In most cases, emission nebula are the result of gas clouds being ionised by the high energy UV radiation coming from very Hot (and often massive) stars/star cluster. In the case of NGC 7000 the star(s) responsible for most of the ionisation was an unknown for quite a long time, it is only in 2004 that the star responsible for the ionisation was located. This star (actually a binary system according to later publication) known as J205551.3+435225 is located behind the dark region of the nebula (bottom right corner of the photo) which explains why it was only recently identified.

(My best guess of the position of J205551.3+435225 in my picture according to what I can find in the original publication and in the SIMBAD database)

One last thing, that star was later nicknamed Bajamar Star, which comes from the original Spanish name for the Bahamas island.

Those do not look like much, but they are, to the best of my knowledge, Herbig-Haro object (to left: HH 94, top right: HH 249 and bottom: HH 95) Herbig-Haro object are ionised gas clouds formed when the jet of hot plasma ejected at the poles of newly born stars interacts with Interstellar gas, they are thus more common in star forming regions. I first noticed one of them (HH 94) after I shared the image with a friend. The What's in my image PixInsight scrip from SetiAstro was very useful in finding out what that was. I couldn't find a lot of information on those objects specifically (and very few pictures), but a few publications did have images to compare with (orientation differs):

(original publication ref for HH 94 & HH 95; additional publication ref for HH294 aka NGC 2023 HH 3) (better images of other Herbig-Haro object taken by Hubble : 1, 2 & 3) Position of the three objects in the original image (another might be present but I wasn't confident they were visible):

Ok, so I was searching for information on some of the objects visible in my photo of the horse head nebula and I found these two posts (Reddit and Astrobin) by DanielZoliro that also used a SII and Ha combination but with a slightly different processing (Notably, the RGB combination being R: SII, G: 0.6xHa + 0.4xSII, B: Ha). I loved his results and I had to try it with my own data. Did turn out great, but there was a reflection of a star on the SII data and this processing amplified it (the big reddish round/donut thing on right of the full image).

(Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera and Baader 6.5nm SHO filter. 5x120s image for each colour filter (RGB), 22x300s for the Ha filter and 32x300s for the SII filter, total imaging time 5h, stacking and processing done in PixInsight.)

Picture of M27, the Dumbbell nebula (aka the Apple Core Nebula), I took at the end of last month. This is a planetary nebula, it's the result of a star similar to our sun, that had turned into a red giant at the end of its life, ejecting its outer layer of gas and plasma into space. A planetary nebula is probably a relatively ''short'' phenomena, lasting around 10 000 years. Once the central star has ejected most of its hydrogen/helium and that the nuclear fusion in it has stopped, the nebula will start to cool down and disappear while the star turns into a white dwarf. Planetary nebula have an important role in redistributing some of the matter from dead/dying stars in the interstellar medium.

I personally think that photo is good, but some of the more faint external structures are barely visible, might take another picture of it and/or more photos to stack later in the month.