This is an image of the region known as the Tarantula Nebula.  It is located near the celestial south pole and is part of the larger complex known as the Large Magellanic Cloud or LMC.  The LMC is actually a satellite galaxy to our own Milky Way, located only 163,000 light years away from us.  Its is estimated to be 1/100th of the mass of the Milky Way.  The LMC is classified as a Magellanic spiral galaxy.  It has a central bar that is geometrically off center, suggesting that it was a barred dwarf spiral galaxy before its spiral arms were disrupted, likely due to the tidal forces of the Milky Way and the smaller SMC satellite galaxy that is also gravitationally locked to the Milky Way.

The Tarantula Nebula complex is located on the south-east  corner of the LMC.  It is a starburst region and the most active area of star formation known in the local group of galaxies.  It is an extremely luminous object.  It is so bright, that if it were as close to the Earth as the Orion Nebula it would cast visible shadows.  The entire region is easily visible with the naked eye from dark sky sites.

This image was captured with my reduced FSQ-106 that is piggybacked on my larger RiDK 400 scope.  I shot a close up of the core of the Tarantula with the larger scope, and captured this data with the smaller one at the same time. The rest of the LMC continues off the bottom of the image.  At some point I will make a mosaic of the whole region using this scope.

My goal during processing was to produce an image that is as true to the object's natural colors as possible.  I used my RGB data and other images online as a guide to achieve this.  In the end, I blended the finished narrow band image with the finished RGB image.  I did this primarily to solve an issue that I had with the cloud itself which had an unnatural red hue to it when using just the narrow band data.  By blending in the RGB, the final result had a much more natural look. 

The narrow band image required a considerable amount of blending within the channels to achieve a natural look while carefully working to avoid a blown out core.  At the same time I tried to maintain colorful structures all the way down to the core itself.

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