Beautiful skies and weather in Cyprus while on holiday enabled me to systematically acquire data for this target every single night between the 8th to 16th September. There's a hell of a lot of rich signal in this image and I was able to bring out features I never knew existed in this area! Specifically, there is a dark nebula between the Heart and Soul which must be closer to us, as it's blocking all light behind it, looks proper 3D! Also, I spotted five stars with a purplish halo around them and I'm guessing they're some sort of stellar accretion disk bourne from this star forming region - not sure, so if you know, let me know!? Then there’s all this golden dust scattered around, with visible regions of nebulous clusters throughout, each one telling their own story of stellar evolution. This is the first time I've managed to accrue so much imaging time on a target and judging from the result, I can see myself doing it again, weather permitting. I dedicated a lot of effort in preserving as “natural” a color palette as possible, blending the L-Extreme filter for the nebulous colors with a UV/IR for organic looking stars. I’m quite happy with the result
Thanks for looking, stay safe and clear skies. Minos
Comments