A Beautiful and bright nebula complex in Orion a mere 1344 light years away, this molecular cloud region has helped to unlock the stars. The main nebula body is about 24 light years across, containing a mass of hydrogen 2,000 times that of our Sun with which new star systems are being born. The core of this nebula contains the core of a very young open cluster, active with baby stars. HDR compositing was used to bring core details out.

The actual nebula itself is huge, spanning nearly a degree across the sky. With my C8 and small sensor, an 8-panel mosaic was required to yield this FOV. The clouds of dust depicted are mostly an HII region of singly-ionized hydrogen centered on ionizing star Theta Orionis C. The nebula body can reach 10,000 K at some points, but temperature dramatically falls near the edges of the nebulous structure.

The Orion nebula serves as a stellar nursery, helping us to observe and understand as new star systems are in the process of forming. Several proto-planetary disks have been observed in this nebula, especially near the core. The HST has observed more than 150 proplyds to date.

Active ionizing winds lead to a very lively stellar wind within the nebulous region, showing itself in the form of Bow shocks, Jet-driven shocks, Warped shocks, and may even generate stellar wind waves. The nebulous gas and dust are quite active itself. Some regions can even be seen beginning to collapse under their own gravity. As a whole, the nebula is evolving toward its own destruction. Through various means, most of the nebulous material will have been ejected in about 100,000 years.

This target began in September, and continued until I could no longer see it. It was a lot of work to HDR composite every panel of an 8-panel mosaic~ the processing on this one began in March and I'm just now finishing up. The colors on this one are not quite standard for LRGB, but, the more I look both at my own color vision disorder and other "true color" images of this target, the less I care about getting the "right colors." on things. There are a few exceptions to this rule, but I think I'm going to abandon the part of the workflow that calls for making blind adjustments to the colors and trying to wrestle them into some civilized form.

Cheers, everyone!

Lilith