The Tadpole NebulaThe dusty emission nebula IC 410 is 100 light-years across and 12,000 light years away. The nebula is associated with the 4-million-years-young open star cluster NGC 1893, and the nebula is ionized by the high-energy UV light from five hot massive blue O stars in the cluster: HD 242935, BD +33 1025, HD 242908, HD 242926, and TYC 2394-1214-1. The ionization leads to Halpha and OIII fluorescence in the red and blue-green. There is also SII emission in the red, but it is relatively weak.
In the past, the nebula contained two enormous pillars of cold gas, like the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula. These pillars have now been eroded by the stellar winds into the wiggling tadpoles. The intense radiation in the area evaporates and ionizes the cold gas at the surface of these globules, while the charged particles in the stellar winds compress the gas into the bright rims around the globules. With time these tadpoles will totally evaporate. But in the meantime, they are stellar nurseries, where new stars may be born.
My processingI used DeepSkyStacker to make the registered Ha, OIII and SII stacks. In Startools, I then applied background extraction, a luminance development stretch, deconvolution, and initial color balance focussing on the nebulosity. The SII data was simply too weak, just adding noise, so I settled on an HO version. A did a similar second processing in Startools focussed on the stars.
In Photoshop I removed stars using StarXterminator, I deblurred the nebulosity layer using APF-R (as used by NASA), denoised/sharpened with NoiseXterminator. I isolated the stars from the image processed for the stars. The star layer was added back in with linear dodge (add). Final noise reduction, color tweaks, curves adjustments were applied separately to the stars and nebulosity layer.
Insight Observatories Data- AFIL-1 Telescope: AG10 CDK F6.7 f=1665mm
- Mount: SkyWatcher EQ8RH
- Camera: ZWO ASI6200MM Pro
- Location: Lijiang, China (Gemini Observatory)
- Dates: 2021-01-08 to 2021-02-05
- Ha: 30 x 600 s
- OIII: 14 x 600 s
- SII (not used): 14x 600 s
- All raw data was bin 2
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