The Carina Nebula is one of the largest and brightest diffuse nebula in the sky.  It is four time bigger and brighter than the Orion Nebula and it is loaded with a variety of interesting object.  It contains several open clusters that contain young, super-luminous O-type stars including WR 25, the most luminous star in our galaxy , a large number of Bok globules, and several Wolf-Rayet stars.  Eta Carina, the brightest star in this image is a hyper-giant, type O2 star that has a mass of 100-150 times the mass of the sun.  It has a luminosity of about 4 million times the sun and it is among the very largest stars in the Milky Way.  This region lies at a distance of 8,500 lys and the nebula has an apparent magnitude of +1.0 so it is easily visible to the naked eye.  Many of the features in this image are named and it is a lot of fun to find objects like the Keyhole nebula and the Defiant Finger that are described in detail here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carina_Nebula.

This is a narrowband image that I started late last April during a full moon cycle.  I didn't know much about this region and I started this project mainly because...well, the moon was full and there it was!  It wasn't until I gathered a fair amount of data before I finally sat down to look at the images and that's when I started to get more excited about what I might be able to do with it.  I have to admit that the amount of data that I gathered wasn't due to any plan.  I just kept running the scope...and I'm glad that I did.  All of that integration time helped to produce a really clean set of integrated data.  I didn't have to use any NR to produce this image.  My GTX130 refractor system produces such consistently clean data that I only tossed out about 6 frames due to passing clouds.  With such a wide field, I don't even bother to sort by FWHM to weed out seeing blurred data.  The biggest challenge was determining the most pleasing color balance and saturation level.  With this image I've returned to my love of fairly bold colors.  To my eye, the colors combine with the structure to create a perception of depth in this image.  I've also noticed that the screen appearance varies quite a bit with ambient lighting and screen brightness levels.  Hopefully it works on your monitor as well as it does on my MacBook Pro.

Zoom in and look around.  There is a LOT going on in this region.  In fact, I'm going to have to get the 20" pointed at some of this stuff the next time that I get a chance!  Enjoy and feel free to provide your thoughts and suggestions.

John