GUYS
I am utterly **mind blown** at how this came out! I've wanted to capture the Heart of the Heart with my C8 for a while, and testing a set narrowband filters (including SII, which I don't have) gave me a good opportunity. As I worked on the colors and it started coming together, I had one of those spine-tingling moments when an image just blows you away. I *made* this!!
This is the core of the Heart Nebula, a large nebula in the constellation Cassiopeia. I'm fascinated by this intricate spiral structure at the center, likely carved out by the massive stars (some 50x the mass of our sun!) born in the nebula. The Heart is 7,500 lightyears away, and spans an area two degrees wide on the sky -- that's four full Moons side-by-side!
This is a false-color image based on the bright emissions of specific wavelengths from hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur gas. I used the Hubble palette, which puts sulfur (which glows a deep red) as red, hydrogen (which also glows red) as green, and oxygen (which glows a teal blue) as blue. It contains a total of 17h50m of data, pared down from 32 hours that made it through my initial quality check.
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