Melotte 15 SHO HST Palette (Starless), Heart within the Heart (Rick Veregin)

Melotte 15 SHO HST Palette (Starless), Heart within the Heart

After processing this image, I noticed there is the faintest ghost of a heart around the centre of Melotte 15. Faint but once I saw it, I can't help seeing it.

Melotte 15 is an OB association of very young hot blue supergiant stars that is only 1.5 million years old, whose intense stellar winds have blown the enormous bubble within the parent HII nebula--the Heart Nebula. Tormented by these winds, the central dust clouds--star forming regions--are twisted into fabulous shapes.

Imaging Telescope The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Robotic Telescope

Object Melotte15 (open cluster within IC1805 (Heart Nebula))

Date 2019 August-September

Narrowband (Ha, OIII, SII): 14 x 1800s each, total 21 hours

Location Sierra Remote Observatories, Auberry, California

Telescope RCOS 16" f/8.9 (3550mm focal length)

CCD Camera SBIG STX16803 16MP (4096 x 4096)

Mount Paramount ME

Filters SBIG Ha (7nm), OIII (8.5nm), SII (8nm)

I registered and stacked the raw data in DSS, with flats, biases and darks.

I found SHO (60+40, 30+30+40,100) gave me a good balance for each channel. In Photoshop, I further tweaked color for that gold/blue HST coloring, with some green.

The starless image was made using Starnet++. I used Topaz AI DeNoise to reduce noise, which really helps bring out detail as well.

Original
Final
B

B

Description: I thought my initial image was a too bright and did not have enough impact. To get a more dramatic look, I reduced the gray point in Photoshop to increase the color impact and contrast. I also reduced the red and enhanced the gold colors a little. Plus a slight crop to focus in a bit more to where all the action is.

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