The Celestial "Snow" angel, as it is called due to the infamous Hubble capture of it more than 10 years ago:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/snow-angel.htmlIt is approximately 2000 light years from Earth and is caused by a massive young star (SH106 IR 4) at the center of the vicious bipolar emissions ejecting gas and dust to create the "wings" of the angel. The star cannot be seen in this image as it is shrouded by the gas and dust emissions in the middle of the central dust pillar. SH106 IR 4 is in fact so young (100 thousand years old), it did not exist when the first Humans walked the earth. Now this young star is furiously working hard at ejecting material that is the foundation for creating many new dwarf stars in the region. The bright star above the nebula seen here actually helps create the "reflection" portion of this nebula.
When the moon is "full" anything goes. This was more of an experimental image to see the limits of what the C11XLT is able to do. The emission nebula is quite small spanning approximately 3 arc minutes across so this was heavily cropped. You can see the full field of view under revisions labeled "original". It sits in a sea of Ha emissions. This was imaged entirely during a nearly full moon while both seeing conditions and subsequently guiding were not optimal over the past few nights. It was created in an unusual HSO palate. From my limited research it seemed that most imaged this in either LRGB or HaLRGB. Very few examples were imaged in SHO, and none that I am aware of were done in HSO. I was not sure if there was any signal in the Sii bandwidth, but I found there was quite a bit of signal in that bandwidth that added some nice definition to the image. As noted above, this was imaged during a fully illuminated moon, so broadband imaging was not an option and I decided to attempt narrowband imaging without any LRGB data as a proof of concept.
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