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Astrophotography

SH2-131 in the Hubble Palette
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Very interesting, Jeff. Thanks for sharing.

Willie

Amazing image. 

This is SH2-131, AKA the “Elephant’s Trunk Nebula”, in the constellation Cepheus, about 2,400 light years from earth and is one of the more frequently imaged objects in the northern hemisphere. I have imaged it myself more than a few times, but this narrow band rendition presents it from a perspective and shows detail I have not been able to capture using my equipment here in Texas/Oklahoma. Nothing like shooting from a ultra-dark sky at high altitude in a super-dry desert region.


This is a narrow band, false-color image, I created from a series of 600-second exposures totaling three hours of exposure time through Hydrogen-alpha, Oxygen III, and Sulphur II filters, with the data presented here as Green, Blue, and Red respectively in the “Hubble Palette”. The data was captured remotely on August 22, 2022, through a Takahashi 106 mm aperture telescope with a focal length of 3096 mm, on a Paramount MX+ mount, by an FLI PL16803 camera, owned by Telescope Live, located at the IC Astronomy Observatory, in the high desert near Oria, Almeria, Spain.


SH2-131 is a relatively small patch of an immense dark, interstellar molecular cloud. It is ionized and thereby glows because of the intense radiation from the young, intensely radiating, massive star seen in the middle of this image, HD 206267, recently (in stellar terms) born from the same cloud it now illuminates. The dark shapes in the image are known as “Bok nebulas” and are, in effect, the embryos of future stars. The less dense cloud material around them has been blown away by the solar wind emitted from HD 206267.


The bright star in the upper right is the “Garnet Star”, (Mu Cephei, or HD 206939), a red hypergiant star, one of the largest known stars, about 3,060 light years from earth, and about 100,000 times brighter than our sun. It is so large that were it to be in the same position as our sun the orbit of Jupiter would be inside the star. Mu Cephei is the farthest star from earth that can be seen with the unaided eye in a dark sky area.

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