Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Serpens (Ser)  ·  Contains:  PGC 202650  ·  PGC 2802113  ·  The star 60Ser  ·  The star 61Ser
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Sh2-64, Westerhout 40, John Favalessa
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Sh2-64, Westerhout 40

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Sh2-64, Westerhout 40, John Favalessa
Powered byPixInsight

Sh2-64, Westerhout 40

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Description

Oh, this was a difficult but beautiful beast to process…causing me to work extra hard on it.  This is actually a 2 panel mosaic…kind of an afterthought.   I saw a bit of the beach sand star field in my well centered first night images, causing me to think, got to get some of that!  Hence Sh1-64 is not centered.  This is purely an LRGB image.  I must have started from scratch more than 10 times.  I’m happy with this result. 

If you want to know more (as I did), from Wikipedia, “Sh2-64, also Westerhout 40, is a star-forming region in the Milky Way located in the constellation Serpens. In this region, interstellar gas forming a diffuse nebula surrounds a cluster of several hundred new-born stars.   The distance to W40 is ~1420 LYs, making it one of the closest sites of formation of high-mass O-type and B-type stars.   The ionizing radiation from the massive OB stars has created an H II region, which has an hour-glass morphology.  Dust from the molecular cloud in which Sh2-64 formed obscures the nebula, rendering it difficult to observe at visible wavelengths of light.”  …and also difficult to process.

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