I have always loved the crab nebula, and revisit it annually. In this image, I combined 70+ hours of exposures taken over two years. This was the first year that I did a lot of OIII, and I was amazed to discover a chimney-like structure of this gas emerging from the upper border of the nebula. I had not seen this in my past images nor in the images of others. At first I thought it was an artifact indicating a problem in my system, but some research confirmed that this is a real structure, that has been explored by professional astronomers (
https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1986ApJ...306..259F).
This is the kind of serendipitous discovery that makes me love this hobby! While the chimney structure is faint, and the research I found only discuss it in terms of the OIII, careful processing of the Ha signal allowed me to draw out Ha as well. The final image makes it seem as if Ha gas is rising up inside an OIII chimney.
I was also fascinated to find galaxies (the small smudges) off the bottom left and top right corners of the nebula, which I had never noticed in shorter integrations.
This LRGBHaOIII image was taken from my backyard in Bortle 8 skies, which means there is hope for all of us!
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