This emission nebula, nicknamed the Heart Nebula, is located 7500 light years away in the constellation of Cassiopeia at a declination of +61 degrees. The nebula spans 1.5 degrees in our apparent view, which corresponds to an actual width of about 180 light years.
This object is a fantastic mix of bright stars, glowing interstellar gas, and dark dust clouds. In the center of the image are the massive hot stars of a newborn star cluster known as Melotte 15. The stellar winds and radiation of these stars are sculpting the surrounding dust clouds into fantastic shapes and pillars.
There are a few other interesting objects here besides IC 1805. At upper right is the Fishhead Nebula (IC1795), which has interestingly shaped dust lanes cutting through the nebula. And at the lower left edge of the image is the bright blue planetary nebula
WeBo1, first discovered in 1996. When I imaged the PN shown in that link, I didn't realize that the OIII signal was so strong, so my PN image is only a Ha-RGB image and didn't include OIII. I will have to reimage it soon.
On a different note, those of you who use PHD2 for guiding (and even those of you who don't!) should check out the latest beta published last week, which now includes multiple star guiding. It is one of those amazing upgrades which seems to good to be true, improving guiding results while requiring no additional work or expertise. I see no downside to using it, and plenty of upside in terms of better guiding.
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