SH2-301: Making Second-Generation StarsOTA: CDK 24
Camera: Moravian 61000Pro
Observatory: Heaven's Mirror
Date of Capture: Feb 24
Date of Processing: Febf 24
Exposures:
R: 10 x 180 sec
G: 10 x "
B: 10 x "
H: 14 x 1200 sec
O: 15 x "
S: 16 x "
Total Exposure time: 16.5 hours
Image Width: 29.5 arc-minutes
Processing Tools:
1. Commercial: PixInsight, Topaz, Photo Director 365, Aurora HDR
2. Pixinsight Addons: NoiseXTerminator, BlurXTerminator, StarXTerminator
3. My Scripts: NB_Assistant, AC_Restar, Subframe Weighting Tool (Excel w/ J. Hunt), ColorTweaker
Target Description:
The most recent study of Sh2-301 that I encountered (
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.01539.pdf) describes this nebula as" a blistered H ii region undergoing star formation." Their IR study found young stellar objects ("second-generat ion stars") cluster in the NE part of the nebula (around 7:00 in my image) and a relative lack of dust and gas in the 2:00 direction, which is consistent with this image.
A massive O-type star, ALS 208, apparently drives the nebula's ionization (making this a Strömgren Sphere.) Maybe you can make out a significantly sized blue star just about in the middle of the inner blue area, just to the left of the dark cloud across the nebula's center?
Processing Description:
SH2-301 has a modest presence on Astrobin…about 40 images.
This is an HSO image where those components have been isolated from the spectral continuum by solutions to sets of simultaneous equations expressing the relationships among broad-band and narrow-band images. The resulting extracted emission-line signals were converted to their true-color equivalents, yielding a color image much more pleasing to my eyes than the scientific mapping of the Hubble palette.
This was a uniformly very high-quality data set and relatively easy to process.
Target Statistics:
Distance: 18.9K ly
Apparent Magnitude: ?
Absolute Magnitude: ?
Average Surface Magnitude: ?
Apparent DSO Span: 2E12 km
Pixel Span at Target: 2E10 km
Alex Woronow 
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