The Herat nebula is an emission nebula. On our sky it is in Cassiopeia constellation, in fact it is in the Perseus Arm of our galaxy, 7500ly away from Earth. Some of the brighter stars in the center are part of the Melotte 15 open cluster. It is a cluster of young stars, few of them are up to 50 times heavier than the Sun, but also there are others smaller than our star. All together they are producing solar winds that are blowing away and lighting up the surrounding clouds which contain Hydrogen, Oxygen and Sulphur. When these elements are ionized, they produce a beautiful mixture of red, blue and orange colors.
If you take a closer look (especially at the starless version B) you will see the signs of continuing star formation – dark pillars and globules. Also, this is something very interesting in the left part of the image, near 9 o’clock – a small blue oval. This is the ring like planetary nebula WeBo 1 (PN G135.6+01.0). The current hypothesis that the nebula is around a barium star which is part of binary system with white dwarf. In short, the barium stars are special kind of red giants which in addition to their usual fusion process are producing elements heavier than iron via s-process using heavy elements delivered by older or even died donor star nearby.
If you want to dive in more details about Barium stars you can start from here -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barium_starAnd for the s-process from here -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-processThis is one of my images I like most! The Black Swan (ZS110) performed amazingly well in combination with the camera and the filters. They are 1.25” and I can’t use the full sensor size, but still provide a lot to see
I have uploaded un-scaled images with a quality that hope thar you will consider as good, so click on the “Full Resolution” for both the main and the starless versions.
Hope you will enjoy the sight
https://www.astrophotography.app/
Comments