Hind's Variable Nebula / NGC 1555 (Jonathan Piques)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Taurus (Tau) · Contains: Hind's Nebula · Hind's Variable Nebula · LBN 817 · NGC 1554 · NGC 1555 · Sh2-238 · Struve's Lost nebula · VdB28

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Hind's Variable Nebula / NGC 1555

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Hind's Variable Nebula / NGC 1555

This is Hind’s Variable Nebula, a variable nebula of only about 4 light-years across, located 400 light years away from Earth in the constellation of Taurus.

A variable nebula is a reflection nebulae that changes in brightness as the star that illuminates it undergoes its own changes. In this case, the nebula is illuminated by T Tauri (the bright orange star in the image), a basically newborn star “only” one million years old. Both star and nebula vary significantly in brightness but not always at the same time, adding to the mystery of the region. To further complicate things, infrared observations suggest that NGC 1555 may also contain a very young stellar object: so the nebula is also a Herbig–Haro object, which is a spinning disk of gas and dust around a newly-formed star that ejects bright jets of matter at extremely high speed, forming a characteristic glow as it collides with the nearby matter. Long story short, there’s a lot going on here and we don’t quite have a firm grasp on it all.

I processed this image a couple of weeks ago, back around the same time I did Dreyer's Nebula, so I don't recall my exact processing steps. My intent was to simply bring out all the lovely faint bits, which involved careful stretching of the luminance--I believe I may have used maskedstretch to get part of the way there, and HT to finish it out. Some modest noise reduction to tamp down on the noise that inevitably results from stretching faint objects. And that's about it: curves adjustments and color tweaks to taste from there.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5422989
PixInsight job	A5G8FRVN6NIY2BBX87TMZM354NDYQ986
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	04h21m58s.580
RA (top/left)	04h20m53s.512
RA (top/right)	04h20m42s.693
RA (bottom/right)	04h23m02s.438
RA (bottom/left)	04h23m13s.626

Dec (center)	+19°25′50″.65
Dec (top/left)	+19°44′37″.21
Dec (top/right)	+19°09′29″.20
Dec (bottom/right)	+19°07′02″.80
Dec (bottom/left)	+19°42′12″.50

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Hind's Variable Nebula / NGC 1555

Hind's Variable Nebula / NGC 1555

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Hind's Variable Nebula / NGC 1555

Hind's Variable Nebula / NGC 1555

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