Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Vela (Vel)
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Gum 20 (RCW 36) in SHO Hubble palette, Jacob Heppell
Gum 20 (RCW 36) in SHO Hubble palette
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Gum 20 (RCW 36) in SHO Hubble palette

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Gum 20 (RCW 36) in SHO Hubble palette, Jacob Heppell
Gum 20 (RCW 36) in SHO Hubble palette
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Gum 20 (RCW 36) in SHO Hubble palette

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Description

The relatively small, and rather faint, H-alpha nebula known as Gum 20 (RCW36) in the constellation Vela at approximately 2300 light years away. A somewhat overlooked nebula by astrophotographers (I could only find a handful of images) but by no means boring as it still sports many of the fine wispy dust lanes that give these nebulas their character. Plus Gum 20 is a site of massive star formation with a stellar density of thousands of stars per cubic light year at the core (what a sight that would be!).
Being dominated by H-alpha, I'd ordinarily do a HaRGB representation but a few hours of SHO imaging revealed a trace of OIII (barely exists!) and a little SII (better than OIII but still really faint). Knowing I'd need a lot of data, I aimed for 30hrs per filter (plus some RGB just for the stars). With the abundance of clear skies over Perth WA during early 2023, acquiring this amount of data didn't take long (bit over a month). After a weekend of processing and fine-tuning, this is what I settled on. Fairly consistent with my standard SHO color scheme. There was also plenty of background H-alpha, which revealed a few patches of dark nebulosity.
Represented in SHO Hubble palette with true color (RGB) stars.

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Gum 20 (RCW 36) in SHO Hubble palette, Jacob Heppell

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Southern Hemisphere Astro