'Surely there is not another field of human contemplation so wondrously rich as astronmy !

It is so easy to reach, so responsive to every mood, so stimulating, uplifting, abstracting, and infinitely consoling. Everybody may not be a chemist, a geologist, a mathematician, but everybody may be and ought to be, in a modest, personal way, an astronomer, for star-gazing is a great medicine of the soul'

(Garret Services, Round the Year with the Stars)

As I am beeing attracted by both aspects, the equally beautiful mysteries of star-gazing and the beautiful deep pictures of astrophotography and their astrophysical foundations, my pure astrophotographic time might be more limited and the picture output lower.

After finishing the Observatory-Construction and not to loose to much visual observation time during this moonless nights, the question for my first photographic target was therefore already partially answered by the need for it to be a narrowband target.

The question of the most massive and brightest stars is one which naturally comes along.

The most massive and brightest stars are the Wolf-Rayet Stars. More than 20x the mass of our sun and sometimes up to 1mil times brighter, with high temperatures exceeding 50.000 degrees Kelvin. These stars develop phenomenally strong stelar winds with exceptionally high speeds. The material blasted into space annually can be up to 10 solar masses per million years or 3 earth masses per year.

In this particular case the surrounding medium is a HII region - Sharpless 162.

This molecular cloud interacts with the stellar winds of the bright Wolf Rayet Star in the upper middle part of the bubble. The molecular material is beeing pushed outwards forming the bubble shape. The bubble is already 10 lightyears in diameter and still expanding with more than 100.000km/h due to the massive pressure of the energetic flow of gas still out powering the resistance of the surrounding material.

Just to the right of the WR-Star a system of cometary knots is clearly visible. They represent the ionized surface of a large mass of neutral material. They are an important structures for astronomers to understand the motion and geometry of the system.

The radiation of the WV-Star heats up the denser regions of the HII -complex causing the glow.

All the processing was solely done with Pixinsight. The color-scheme is oriented towards a visual representation. The more orange tone there is, the less SII component is present. OIII is mapped to blue and green.

This is my first processed picture - and as such took me a long time from the subs to the pic.

I admire a lot of pictures created and presented by members of this community here and like to start contributing a little bit myself.

I know that a lot of aspects are not optimal but I really welcome feedback.

Mario