This telescopic close-up shows off the otherwise faint emission nebula IC 410. It also features two remarkable inhabitants of the cosmic pond of gas and dust above and left of center, the tadpoles of IC 410. Partly obscured by foreground dust, the nebula itself surrounds NGC 1893, a young galactic cluster of stars. Formed in the interstellar cloud a mere 4 million years ago, the intensely hot, bright cluster stars energize the glowing gas. Composed of denser cooler gas and dust, the tadpoles are around 10 light-years long and are likely sites of ongoing star formation. Sculpted by winds and radiation from the cluster stars, their heads are outlined by bright ridges of ionized gas while their tails trail away from the cluster's central region. IC 410 lies some 10,000 light-years away, toward the nebula-rich constellation Auriga. [Source: APOD].

CAPTURE Information: This is a Two-Panel Mosaic.

The image was captured with the iOptron CEM120 mount , the venerable Meade 12"LX200 SCT, and my Atik 383L+ mono CCD at F7.16 (2182mm FL).

Image subs were taken through Astronomik's narrowband filters of Ha, SII and OIII.

IMAGE information -- 2021

The following is a breakdown of each panel (i.e. panel 1 and panel 2, in that order).

Ha : 31 and 32 subs (5.17 and 5.33 hr) on Jan 30th, 31st and Feb 2nd, 3rd and 5th.

OIII : 20 and 20 subs (3.33 and 3.33 hr) on Jan 30th, 31st and Feb 2nd and 3rd.

SII : 20 and 20 subs (3.33 and 3.33 hr) on Jan 30th, 31st and Feb 2nd and 3rd.

All exposures were at 10 minutes (600s) each, 1x1 bin and -10C.

Each two panels of Ha, SII and OIII were individually integrated, then merged, and lastly combined. The three assemblies then created the Hubble Palette, using PixelMath and the following “SHO” formula:

Red = SII

Grn = Ha

Blu = OIII

Luminance was created using only subs from the Ha filter.

Processing was done with PixInsight, following (for the most part) kayronjm's tutorial of Feb. 24th from several years back. Credit also goes to Rick Stevenson’s Color Mask Script and Christopher Gomez’s tutorial.

COMMENTS:

I’m fairly certain that I had previously done this target around 2013. Unfortunately, this was the dark period when my (less than reliable) Dell Desktop decided to trash out a large part of my data. It not only lost images on its hard drive, but also took out a Western Digital external hard drive which housed most all of my images. Not real happy with Dell.

TBH, I have no record (not even a JPEG) of this target (other than my memory).

I have recently done a few two-panel mosaics (IC1795, NGC7380 and NGC281). As previously mentioned, mosaics take a lot of time and I had little interest in doing more. Nevertheless, here’s another (again).

I believe it came out pretty good.