NGC 6188 (Fighting Dragons of Ara) (Torben van Hees)

NGC 6188 (Fighting Dragons of Ara)

NGC 6188 is an emission nebula at the rim of a dark molecular cloud in the constellation Ara. Young stars of the Ara OB-1 association are providing energy for its ionisation and their star wind forms the dust and gas into these bizarre forms.

This is the "major" image I took during my Namibia family trip. I only got about 2h worth of data on this per night because of moon glow, restrictions to take lithium-based batteries on airline travel, the problem of splitting time between family and setting up AP gear and the danger of wildlife in many places (can't have baboons close, they'll take anything apart). Still, totally worth it. I feel it's one of the most iconic nebulae of the southern skies. Also, on the second night, the RST tipped over (totally my fault - I didn't think to check if it was stable in all positions, especially without power) which didn't destroy any major component but broke the USB stick with the data on it. Fortunately I could get it rescued, but it needed physical reconstruction and connection to an external controller. Expensive and quite time-consuming.

While the first two nights were shot with a rather fullish moon up, the last night used the excellent dark skies (true Bortle 1, measured SQM 22.2) of Namibia to their fullest: The data has very low noise and high dynamic range. It was a struggle to decide which parts of the nebula to emphasise and which parts to suppress a bit more. In the end, I decided on this rather classical rendering.

Original
Final
B

B

Description: New processing, different palette

Uploaded: ...

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Emission Nebula and Supernova Remnants

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9289014
PixInsight job	RCGTIW8MF3YH3D0O4YR12H004R7F9NT6
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	16h38m56s.31
RA (top/left)	16h51m05s.46
RA (top/right)	16h46m37s.38
RA (bottom/right)	16h27m03s.82
RA (bottom/left)	16h30m43s.97

Dec (center)	-48°32′52″.2
Dec (top/left)	-49°06′09″.10
Dec (top/right)	-46°55′28″.4
Dec (bottom/right)	-47°54′54″.3
Dec (bottom/left)	-50°08′18″.10

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