This region of the sky is mind blowing.  Located in the constellation of Ara, The Fighting Dragons of Ara is an emission nebula complex that's located at a distance of about 4,000 ly.  This region contains complex shapes, Bok globules, dark dust lanes along with an interesting mix of emissions from different elements.  Strong UV radiation pressure from young, intense OB1 type stars along with supernova events have helped to sculpt and illuminate much of this region.  This is an SHO image of this region.  If you look closely there are complex knots of detail along an emission wall reminiscent of the Great Wall in Cynus.  Here is a tight zoom of that region.  Look closely and you'll see a ring of bright blue O2 emissions surrounding H150136 (the brightest star along the top edge of the image.).  Strong Ha emissions that show up as a greenish glow peaking through a hole in the dark nebula near the center of this cropped image.  Overall, this among the most fascinating and beautiful regions of the sky that I've ever imaged and I can see that there's going to be a lot to explore in this region when I get my new scope. It's no wonder that it's such a popular object for southern imagers.



Below the Dragons lies NGC 6164, The Dragon's Egg Nebula, created by an imbedded massive O-type star.  The striking deep blue halo is suggestive of some sort of nota ejection event.  In SHO wavelengths, the Dragon Egg takes on a teal color.  Here's a close up showing what "The Egg" looks like in a HO bi-color image taken with my 20" scope.  Notice the interesting cone-like feature above the central bright star.  Fascinating stuff!



I started on this image in late June during a waxing moon and mostly due to laziness, I let it rip for quite a long time.  I was stunned to see that I had gathered 45 hours by the time I pointed the scope to another target.  That's enough data to create pretty clean image so I could push the details pretty hard.  I actually gathered RGB data as well so that I could insert RGB stars into the image, but in the end, I decided not to go there.  This nebula lies in an extremely dense star field and adding color to the stars would distract from the excellent colors of the nebula itself so I left the stars white.  I'm generally not a fan of starless images but in this case, the starless version was pretty stunning.  So, for the main image, I strongly de-emphasized the stars using both a gentle application of StarShrink combined with MorphologicalTransformation.  The stars are there but to my eye, they don't overwhelm the nebula.

This image is so detailed down to the full pixel resolution of the sensor that I uploaded the image at the full sensor resolution.  In order to control the size of the image, I did have to compress the image just a little. It's not a lot but it's enough to see a tiny difference it what shows up here compared to what the image looks like uncompressed on my PC.  I can see it, but hopefully it's not too noticeable for most folks here.

The 130GTX system has been a real workhorse, but lately the QHY600M-PH camera has starting acting up.  So far it's minor and it's fixed by reseting the camera by cycling power, but I have to catch it or it hangs the system.  Hopefully this behavior will disappear as mysteriously as it arrived; but I doubt it.  I have not had a good experience with QHY cameras fixing themselves so we'll see.  

I experienced another "little" glitch the other day when I had a serious temporary lapse of attention while formatting a GPS data card and accidentally erased ALL of my processed data from 2023 and half of 2022.  Oops.  I can still visit those images here but if I want the originals, I'm going to have to reprocess them from scratch.  I was strangely mostly unfazed by this massive screw up.  I guess I harbor a notion that I could make them a lot better if I take a second shot at them.  That's certainly not true, but that's why the event didn't make me see the same color red that I might have seen had I erased my main Mac drive (which is totally backed up to the cloud.). Trying to reconstruct my PC drive from the cloud would have bricked my whole operation until I could get it restored.  Anyway, I'll have to be a bit more careful going forward.  That stupid GPS thing is the result of a Garmin bug and it requires reformatting a SD card--every 28 days.  I hate any operation that requires formatting anything.  Apparently accidents can happen.

Anyway, C&C is always welcome so feel free to let me know how it looks on your monitor.

John