IC2944, nicknamed The Running Chicken nebula, is an emission nebula in Centaurus, 5900 light years distant and is part of the Sagittarius Arm , the nearest spiral arm of the Milky Way.
The most interesting feature of this nebula is the presence of some dark cocoons, known as Thackeray's globules. Due to their instability, inside them there is no phenomena of active star formation, while their origin is due to the action of the disintegrant radiation of massive stars in the region, which over time has eroded the ancient molecular cloud.
The globules of dense chunk of gas and dust are nearly 1.4 light years in width, and often are called Bok's Globules in other similar structures in the universe.
For a paper with a lot of information on IC2944 and Thackeray's Globules, please see here:
http://heritage.stsci.edu/2002/01/paper1997aa.pdfThis image has been taken with the new set-up, but something unexpected happened: the image inside PixInsight, an environment of 32 bits of float point, was spectacular. When I did the conversion to jpeg I noted a lot of speckles over the image. I tried to clean them up the best I could. This is a real pain in the neck.
Image's capture datails:
Ha: 8x900sec
RGB: 10x300sec bin2x2
Bias and dark applied
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