IC 3372: Gabriela Mistral Nebula

OTA:……………….CDK17

Camera:………….SBIG STXL11002with AOX and FW8G (0.63 arsec/pxl)

Observatory:…. Heaven's Mirror, Chile

EXPOSURES:

…R……10 x 900 sec.

…B….....9 x 900

…G……17 x 900

…L…….12 x 900

…H.….18 x 1800

Total exposure 21 hours

Image Width: 41 arc-minutes

Processed by Alex Woronow (2021) using PixInsight, Skylum, Topaz, SWT

IC 3372, this remarkably complex nebula, also goes by the name "Gabriela Mistral Nebula." Gabriela Mistral was the pseudonym of a famous Chilean poet, educator, humanist, and Nobel laureate.

I had a professor of atmospheric physics many, many years ago who said, "the earth's atmosphere is turbulent at all scales." I've always wondered if the same is true of nebulae, particularly those being churned by the violence of star birth and death, as this nebula is. I believe the chances are excellent, even though our images often portray them as cotton puff balls. Some of that portrayal probably addresses a desire for a refuge of calm somewhere in our political and covid disrupted lives, somewhere in the Universe. Still, more than that, we have not had the image-capture and image-processing tools and techniques that have allowed us to expose the complexity out there. We have those tools now; better cameras, better astro-image-processing tools, and, most of all, an ever-increasing array of artificial-intelligence apps for remarkable image refinement. We stretched tools such as deconvolution to (and beyond) its algorithimic limit in efforts to realize the pixel resolution reported by FWHM measurements. But image resolution has other domains than remediating atmospheric spread. For instance, an often-neglected component is color contrast; another is scale-dependent brightness contrast.

This image exploits a battery of modern image-processing technologies for resolution enhancement, many developed for medical diagnoses. The rough texture in parts of the nebula resolves into fragmented patches of clouds separated by linear and nearly linear dark channels if you zoom in. Sometimes the channels arc gently along parallel paths; sometimes, they cross; sometimes, they run in one direction in one patch and a different direction in an adjoining patch. No channels cut the bright puff of clouds that appears to lead the expanding front. The cloud appears smooth at the available resolution but undoubtedly has turbulence hidden from this camera view.

By the way, this image is down-sampled to about 70% for presentation here, and the scars left by StarNet have not been "repaired," so that false details have not been generated. Version B shows the StarNet scars repaired and stars reinstated.