IC1805 The Heart Nebula

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Trev S

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Aug 9, 2022, 12:16:25 PM8/9/22
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The Heart Nebula, also known as IC 1805, Sharpless 2-190 and the Running Dog Nebula, is about 7500 light years away from Earth and is located in Cassiopeia. It was discovered by William Herschel on 3 November 1787 and is an emission nebula showing glowing ionized hydrogen gas and darker dust lanes.

The brightest part of the nebula (a knot at its western edge) is separately classified as NGC 896, because it was the first part of the nebula to be discovered. The nebula's intense output is driven by the radiation emanating from a small group of stars near the nebula's center. This open cluster of stars, known as Collinder 26 or Melotte 15, contains a few bright stars nearly 50 times the mass of our Sun, and many more dim stars that are only a fraction of our Sun's mass.

The Heart Nebula is also made up of ionised oxygen and sulfur gasses, responsible for the rich blue and orange colours. The shape of the nebula is driven by stellar winds from the hot stars in its core. The nebula also spans almost 2 degrees in the sky, covering an area four times that of the diameter of the full moon.

This image uses the SHO pallette and is a combination of data taken on 1st October, 22nd & 25th November and 4th & 6th December 2021 from my back garden in Surrey. It was stacked in AstroPixelProcessor and processed in Pixinsight and Photoshop and consists of about 15h 45m of imaging time.

Ha (green) 65 x 300s 
Oiii (blue) 51 x 300s 
Sii (red) 46 X 300s 
RGB 35 x 60s 
L 30 x 60s 

Esprit 80ED with dedicated flattener
AZ-EQ6GT mount
ZWO ASI1600MM-C camera
ZWO filters
SGPro for camera and mount control
PHD2 for guiding
AstroPixelProcessor, Pixinsight and PS for processing


SHO_DBE_st3_RGB_PS1c.jpg

paul stenning

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Aug 9, 2022, 1:30:51 PM8/9/22
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I very much like images of the heart nebula and would definitely like to get much closer to the central pillars,Well done it is a very good image.

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JR

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Aug 9, 2022, 2:45:10 PM8/9/22
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You put a huge effort into that Trevor and it's paid off big time all ways round, with the composition, the data acquisition, and the processing .   An amazing image.  Well done

James

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On 9 Aug 2022, at 17:16, Trev S <trevs...@gmail.com> wrote:

The Heart Nebula, also known as IC 1805, Sharpless 2-190 and the Running Dog Nebula, is about 7500 light years away from Earth and is located in Cassiopeia. It was discovered by William Herschel on 3 November 1787 and is an emission nebula showing glowing ionized hydrogen gas and darker dust lanes.
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<SHO_DBE_st3_RGB_PS1c.jpg>

John Mills

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Aug 9, 2022, 4:49:26 PM8/9/22
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Hi Trevor,
That´s a great looking image. Well done. Must have taken taken you ages
to process all that data. Not only narrow band but LRGB also. Quite an
achievement!

ATB John M


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Tim Coskun

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Aug 10, 2022, 3:45:17 AM8/10/22
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That's a super image Trev - very well done - you should be proud of it. I particularly like the colour hue. Did you use the LRGB channels just for the stars or did you combine them into the nebula and background narrowband data also?
Cheers Tim C

Kevin Phillips

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Aug 15, 2022, 9:16:24 AM8/15/22
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What a beautiful image. Great colors. A lot of work went into this image. 
Kevin


From: 'JR' via croydonastro <croydo...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, August 9, 2022 7:45:00 PM
To: croydo...@googlegroups.com <croydo...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [croydonastro - 7368] IC1805 The Heart Nebula
 

William Bottaci

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Aug 15, 2022, 2:41:12 PM8/15/22
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Hello Trevor, another 'keeper', it would look envious on anyone's wall, and all your own work - short of making the equipment yourself.
Your choice of the Hubble palette means that we can compare with others, and the differences are more with individual choice than quality. You have captured subtle detail and the stars are small and round.
Similar images show more contrast and colour but whilst that's okay/popular for some your version is more subtle and realistic which I prefer.

Of note, this object is the same distance and direction as the Double Cluster, NGC884 and 869; both 7,500 lightyears and only about 3º apart, so both are close to each other in the Perseus Arm, further out from us. I wonder what each would look like from each other. I don’t think there is anything near us that can pin down our address...

Also of note, the size that stars in Melotte 15 that can grow (50 solar masses is very high) depends, amongst other things, the purity of the hydrogen gas they contract from; the less of anything other than hydrogen and helium the more massive they get, because ... that's another story for another time.

As stars shine across the whole spectrum but the gas only in parts, you used three lots of filters. Ha, Oiii, Sii for the cloud, L (no filter) for the stars, and R G B in between for good measure. I'm sure this isn’t quite right; as Tim asks please let us know.

The image straight out of the camera will be very dark. There's no easy way of having it brighter in the camera. You could expose for an hour instead of 5 minutes, but then light pollution would creep in, and everything else would make it worse. As the object gets close to the horizon the atmosphere degrades the image, and you'd only be able to do a few exposures all night. You wouldn't get the benefit of reduced noise because of fewer exposures, and the rest. Brightening the image is part of processing, and requires skill, perhaps more than any other part of processing, which requires knowledge.
For all the work and expense that goes into producing Hubble Space Telescope images, they have a better starting point than us.

Thanks for sharing.
William




On Mon, 15 Aug 2022 at 14:16, Kevin Phillips <thewels...@live.com> wrote:
What a beautiful image. Great colors. A lot of work went into this image.
Kevin



On Wed, 10 Aug 2022 at 08:45, Tim Coskun <tcos...@gmail.com> wrote:
That's a super image Trev - very well done - you should be proud of it. I particularly like the colour hue. Did you use the LRGB channels just for the stars or did you combine them into the nebula and background narrowband data also?
Cheers Tim C



On Tue, 9 Aug 2022 at 21:49, John Mills <ejm...@millseyspages.com> wrote:
Hi Trevor,
That´s a great looking image. Well done. Must have taken taken you ages to process all that data. Not only narrow band but LRGB also. Quite an achievement!
ATB John M



On Tue, 9 Aug 2022 at 19:45, 'JR' via croydonastro <croydo...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
You put a huge effort into that Trevor and it's paid off big time all ways round, with the composition, the data acquisition, and the processing .   An amazing image.  Well done
James



On Tue, 9 Aug 2022 at 18:30, paul stenning <paulste...@gmail.com> wrote:
I very much like images of the heart nebula and would definitely like to get much closer to the central pillars,Well done it is a very good image.



SHO_DBE_st3_RGB_PS1c.jpg

Trev S

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Oct 3, 2022, 11:05:49 AM10/3/22
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Thanks for all the kind comments.
Tim and William, I did use LRGB for the stars.  I processed the nebula with stars removed then added the stars later using PixelMath in Pixinsight. I have adopted this method generally now as I believe the final images are significantly better.

On a side note, I have recently returned from a river cruise in Europe and we had a few nights where the sky was crystal clear, sufficient to see M31 unaided and glimpse M33 with averted vision.  Unfortunately, I didnt have any camera equipment with me, not that it would have been much use on a moving boat. With skies like that I am pretty sure we could produce much better images. We can only dream.
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