I have recently been interested in exploring regions of our cosmic neighborhood that are revealing the birth of new stars. Taurus is full of them. I have been pleasantly surprised as I image objects that are not always on a popular list. In this image, RY Tauri emerges from a cloud. A variable, T-Tauri pre-main sequence star, it still has sufficient energy from its stellar winds to clear away some occluding dust and give us a peak of its surroundings. RY Tauri is more massive than typical T-Tauri stars, and fluctuates by one or two magnitudes of brightness over a duration of close to 30 days. This may be due to the suspected protoplanetary disk surrounding the star and light passing through areas of lesser and greater density. Light is gradually increasing, as measured over decades, likely due to the accretion of mass and increased temperatures in its core. If interested, here is an article exploring the stellar jets, surrounding envelope and disk of RY Tauri.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.06910Image acquisition info:
Date: Nov 2023
Location: Fairview, UT
Telescope: Planewave 17
Camera: QHY 600M
Mount: Astro-Physics 1600
LRGB: 62:20:21:17 (600s subs, 20 hours)
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