Flame Nebula (SHO) #2 (Molly Wakeling)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Orion (Ori) · Contains: 50 zet Ori · Alnitak · LBN 946 · NGC 2024 · The star Alnitak (ζOri)

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Flame Nebula (SHO) #2

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Flame Nebula (SHO) #2

Located on Orion's right hip (the bright star is the easternmost/leftmost star (from the northern hemisphere), Alnitak, of Orion's belt), the Flame Nebula is a fiery emission nebula. It's a particularly dense part of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, packed with hydrogen gas that glows a deep red when excited by the UV radiation blasting off of Alnitak. Obscured behind the thick light-absorbing dust is a cluster of newborn stars, which can be seen in infrared and x-ray images from space telescopes.

This image is a heavily-modified Hubble palette image -- I started with assigning SII to red, Ha to green, and OIII to blue. But this nebula is heavily dominated by hydrogen (most of the time, it's just imaged in wideband color with hydrogen added in to get nice detail and contrast), so I messed with the colors to give it a nice look. This image is actually a much closer approximation to it's "real" colors than the Hubble palette would give it. (Although, mine's got a lot more orange/yellow).

I'm currently testing Optolong's new 3nm narrowband filters, and they asked me to image a region near a bright star to see how bad the OIII halo was -- this is a common problem particularly for OIII filters as you get to narrower bandwidths. The OIII halo wasn't much worse than the Ha and SII from the super-oversaturation of Alnitak. You can also see here donuts from each filter as the light from Alnitak bounced around my telescope's tube and the other optics.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5599031
PixInsight job	IHWIGNA9DYD3FIXXS59K0Y5HZC50762L
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	05h41m43s.318
RA (top/left)	05h42m42s.452
RA (top/right)	05h40m20s.380
RA (bottom/right)	05h40m43s.835
RA (bottom/left)	05h43m05s.384

Dec (center)	-01°50′44″.91
Dec (top/left)	-01°27′42″.37
Dec (top/right)	-01°32′47″.37
Dec (bottom/right)	-02°13′48″.88
Dec (bottom/left)	-02°08′44″.74

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Flame Nebula (SHO) #2

Flame Nebula (SHO) #2

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Flame Nebula (SHO) #2

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