More Backyard Astronomy 12/20/2020. This is my photograph of the Running Man Nebula in the Constellation of Orion. It is located in the upper portion of the Sword of Orion. It is designated as Sharpless 279 from the Sharpless Catalogue, not that it isn't sharp. It is a half degree above the Great Nebula in Orion Messier 42, which I posted in my last blog.

The enigmatic Running Man looks more like a gorilla, but that doesn't explain what he is running from. Perhaps he is running from the hot stars which are causing a reflection off of the Hydrogen and Oxygen gases which form the clouds seen in the photograph.

There are three main nebula which almost converge and the gap between them produces this silhouette of this running man or beast. The Running Man Nebula includes pink HII emission regions, and blue reflection nebulae. Dark dust throughout the nebula gives the area surrounding the bright nebula a smoky texture. This complex lies around 1,500 light years away, and is about 7.5 light years across.

I photographed the nebula using Oxygen III and Hydrogen Alpha filters. The large globes around the stars at the foot of the man appear only in the photographs I captured in the Hydrogen. Altogether I captured thirty exposures of five minutes (30x300 on two successive night and stacked them using a program called Astro Pixel Processor. I assigned the color red to the Hydrogen and Green and Blue to the oxygen. You can tell from the photograph which regions of this structure are made of each gas.

My dear wife, and astronomy widow, puts up with this hobby of mine because I'm not just goofing off, I'm doing "science." At least that's what I tell her. She has long gone to sleep when I return to the bedroom clad in 15 pounds of cold weather gear. But, if it is clear, I'll be out in the old backyard observatory again tonight.

Merry Christmas and Happy Chanukah.

Clear Skies to you - Ken Adler