IC 348 Stellar Nursery - 8" ONTC Newtonian - ASI1600MM - SHO - CEM60 - Voyager - 53 hours (Rowland Archer)

IC 348 Stellar Nursery - 8" ONTC Newtonian - ASI1600MM - SHO - CEM60 - Voyager - 53 hours

IC 348 is an active stellar nursery in the constellation Perseus, located about 1000 light years from Earth.

According to the article A Census of Young Stars on the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics website https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/census-young-stars, it contains at least 300 young stars in the 2 to 3 million year old range. Compare that to our 4 billion year old Sun - these are baby stars indeed!

Studies of this cluster have found very young stars that are still growing by gathering material from the surrounding gas and dust cloud. Others are at the stage where planets may begin to form from the surrounding disk. It is estimated that new stars are forming at a rate of one per twenty thousand years - a short time in the life of our Universe, yet over 200 times our human lifespan. So many mind-bending concepts await our exploration of the Cosmos.

This is a zoomed in view of the cluster to focus on the inner gas and dust cloud. Those two light spears shooting in from the lower right are from Omicron Persei, which dominated the full-scale image. It's so bright that the Newtonian's mirror structure was clearly illuminated in the image.

I shot 53 hours of data with a mix of SII, OIII and Ha filters. it's a straight SHO combination in PixInsight. The result was rather noisy considering the hours of integration, but I'm not sure how much cleaner it would get with any reasonable increase of exposures.

Thanks for stopping by.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8772841
PixInsight job	R26BZITPRA9BODQAP41KCU7Z1KUPGYO6
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	03h44m35s.630
RA (top/left)	03h44m56s.339
RA (top/right)	03h44m58s.152
RA (bottom/right)	03h44m14s.892
RA (bottom/left)	03h44m13s.147

Dec (center)	+32°09′23″.40
Dec (top/left)	+32°05′08″.93
Dec (top/right)	+32°13′11″.60
Dec (bottom/right)	+32°13′36″.88
Dec (bottom/left)	+32°05′34″.73

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