The Eridanus Loop is an extended HII region that forms part of the Orion-Eridanus Superbubble. This image presents a 10 degree by 7 degree section of the Eridanus Loop and includes over 13 hours of exposure in Ha alone, which was barely enough to provide sufficient signal to noise ratio for this faint object. This
Wikipedia article here describes the Orion-Eridanus Superbubble as "... located west of the Orion Nebula ..." and " ...is formed from overlapping supernova remnants that may be associated with the Orion OB1 stellar association". It is a fascinating area to explore with a wide field imaging set up.
The
Milky Way Explorer, which is part of the
Galaxymap.org site, is a very useful resource for exploring HII regions with a view to selecting imaging targets.
This link will take you to the
Finkbeiner hydrogen-alpha survey page and provides an excellent graphical interface to do a deep dive into the Milky Way and research future imaging projects. I have edited a copy of the area surrounding the Orion-Eridanus Superbubble and included this in Revision B to this post. This shows the full extent of the Superbubble in relation to well known objects such as Barnard's Loop, the Angel Fish Nebula (SH 2-264), the Flame Nebula (SH 2-277) and the Orion Nebula (SH 2-281). Also shown in the green box at the bottom of the image is the area covered by the image in this post. The image in Revision C is a edited screen shot from Stellarium showing the constellation of Eridanus and the area covered by this post.
My thanks to my imaging colleague
@Niall MacNeill for helping with reviews of the image processing work in progress.
Clear skies,
Rodney
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