Flaming Star Nebula (Red Zone) (Jonathan Piques)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Auriga (Aur) · Contains: AE Aur · Flaming Star Nebula · IC 405 · Sh2-229

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Flaming Star Nebula (Red Zone)

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Flaming Star Nebula (Red Zone)

Been digging into my backlog of astrophotos to process this weekend, so we've got a twofor, after the Monkey Head earlier: this is the Flaming Star Nebula. The bright star in the upper right, AE Aurigae, is colloquially named the Flaming Star, and the surrounding nebula (IC 405) is named the Flaming Star Nebula, and the region does kind of look like fire, though there is no actual fire. The material that appears as smoke is mostly interstellar ionized hydrogen, but it does contain smoke-like dark filaments of carbon-rich dust. AE Aurigae itself is so hot it glows blue, emitting light so energetic it jars electrons loose from surrounding gas. When the stripped proton recaptures an electron, light is emitted, as seen in the surrounding emission nebula. The Flaming Star Nebula is pretty close by, as these things go, at about 1,500 light years distant and spanning ~5 light years. It is visible with a small telescope toward the constellation of the Charioteer (Auriga).

This image is mostly a broadband (all visible light) image, in contrast to my last couple of images. I did add in light to the red channel from ionized hydrogen for a little more detail. All in all, I'm still not super thrilled with it, but am glad to be done: this target deserves a shorter focal length (wider), the star shapes and colors came out kind of funny in places which took work to correct, and it doesn't really offer the kind of detail with low noise levels that I usually like to bring out--I had to de-noise more than I would have liked. Darker skies and more data collection would help. Still, it's good enough to set aside for now, with the intent to maybe improve upon it next year.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3679390
PixInsight job	6DIES8MPMIQYP5N95IJ5C1XZBLHKUYHA
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	05h15m18s.762
RA (top/left)	05h14m57s.555
RA (top/right)	05h17m54s.587
RA (bottom/right)	05h15m40s.231
RA (bottom/left)	05h12m43s.272

Dec (center)	+34°21′27″.36
Dec (top/left)	+33°49′07″.93
Dec (top/right)	+34°27′13″.46
Dec (bottom/right)	+34°53′48″.71
Dec (bottom/left)	+34°15′29″.55

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Flaming Star Nebula (Red Zone)

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