The Tarantula Nebula, in the southern constellation Dorado, is a giant star forming region, a thousand light-years in diameter, within the Large Magellanic Cloud. About 180 thousand light-years away, it's the largest, most violent star forming region known in the whole Local Group of galaxies.... Within the Tarantula (NGC 2070), intense radiation, stellar winds and supernova shocks from the central young cluster of massive stars, R136, energize the nebular glow and shape the spidery filaments. ... If the Tarantula Nebula were at the same distance as the Orion Nebula (1500 LYR), it would take up half the sky. [from NASA APOD write-up 2017].
This 40.1 hr image with LRGBSHO filters (including 11 hrs of shorter exposures for HDR) is with "natural color mapping" of the narrow band data plus primarily RGB stars. The data was collected by DeepSkyWest in Chile in January and February 2022.
Chroma LRGBSHO 8mm filters: L:12x600s, L: 15x120s, R: 18x600s, R:15x120s, G: 12x600, G:15x120sm B: 26x600s, BL17x129s
Ha: 14x1800, Ha:24x300, OIII: 13x1800s, OIII:18x300 SII: 11x1800, SII: 21x900s. Total Exposure: 40.1 hrs
An interesting comparison of the recently released JWST image of this target with a crop of my image above is presented at:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/9906726@N08/52365378115/in/dateposted-public/lightbox/where thousands of individual stars from the illuminating R136 cluster illuminating the nebula are resolved by JWST. The Tarantula nebula turns out to be very important to increasing understanding of early star formation in galaxies, hence JWST plans detailed further studies of it.
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