Alnilam and Environs (Michael Feigenbaum)

Alnilam and Environs

I've been trying to find interesting subjects that are sort of hiding in plain sight. When I first began doing this work, I was trying to image The Flame Nebula and was unable to manage to frame it correctly and wound up centered on Alnilam instead of Alnitak. Even with that first very primitive image that I had attempted, I could see there could be some interesting things to be imaged in this area of the sky..

So that's what I did, I simply set up with Alnilam in the middle of the frame and let it rip. I was pretty sure I would find some interesting things here because of the general location in what amounts to the middle of Orion. But I did not expect as much as I actually captured and I was pleasantly surprised.

Alnilam, the middle star of Orion's belt is very bright and is an interesting star in its own right being a blue supergiant with a mass of ~40x that of the sun. It seems to be carving out many beautiful structures in the surrounding gas and dust with the enormous amount of energy it emits.

Processing this was difficult because of the brightness of Alnilam and I did make a "game" mask to try to tone that down a little. The area around the center of the star that appears less bright was something I did not expect to see but I think it is simply an artifact attributable to the limitations of both my skill as an image processor and my equipment.

The surrounding structures I found to be quite fascinating, especially the structure at about the 8 o'clock position relative to Alnilam that looks similar to one of the Tadpoles of IC410.

The original image is an Ha version, I've also included a Frank Breslawski "crazy formula" bicolor version togethet with the final HaOiiiLRGB version.

Anyhow, I hope you like this one and comments and/or criticism always welcome!

CS and good health...

Original
C
Final
F

C

Description: Frank Brezlawski "crazy formula" bicolor version

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7187938
PixInsight job	CQT3RCYXGCR7T6KJUPUYAMRNP55DW6XJ
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	05h36m09s.88
RA (top/left)	05h41m03s.70
RA (top/right)	05h34m03s.80
RA (bottom/right)	05h31m16s.63
RA (bottom/left)	05h38m16s.93

Dec (center)	-01°10′11″.7
Dec (top/left)	-00°05′20″.6
Dec (top/right)	+00°22′20″.5
Dec (bottom/right)	-02°15′02″.3
Dec (bottom/left)	-02°42′47″.7

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