This is my 3rd targeting of The Heart Nebula and the first time as a monochromej/Narrowband imaging session. This is a fitting target for personal reasons (for me) - it is soon to be my wife's birthday and this Nebula symbolizes what she means to me - she is my Heart and my Light...
This was captured for three nights of imaging; the first being a bit short as I worked through the sensor tilt adjustment of my ZWO ASI2600MM-P.
Lum: 52 x 120s
Ha: 50 x 300s
Sii: 40 x 300s
Oiii: 34 x 300s
Post processing was in PixInsight with the Hubble/SHO palette. After cropping and DBE, I split the narrow band images into a Starless version, and Stars, for separate post processing. This allows processing to go after Nebula details relatively aggressively without having to be concerned about star bloating.
The
Heart Nebula,
IC 1805,
Sharpless 2-190, is some 7500
light years away from
Earth and is located in the
Perseus Arm of the
Galaxy in the constellation
Cassiopeia. It was discovered by
William Herschel on 3 November 1787.=10.5px It 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
red output and its morphology are 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.
More information on this object can be found here:
Heart Nebula - Wikipedia
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