This is a wide field view of the Flaming Star nebula and the area commonly called the Tadpoles.  It is a beautifully rich area about 12,500 light years away in the Auriga constellation.  The Tadpoles are in the upper left of the image, and the Flaming Star is on the right. 

One of the great things about this hobby is learning what in the heck these things are.  I tend to end up spending hours researching online, trying to figure out what are the physics involved and how it is all related. 

The Flaming Star nebula is an amazing object that has recently captured my attention.  The nebula is created by a single star that escaped from its neighborhood in Orion as a result of a violent collision.  The star, AE Aurigae, is now traveling through the area.  Its intense radiation is exciting the gasses that make up the nebula causing it to emit light.  There is a more complete write up about the Flaming Star written in the closeup image in my gallery if you are interested.

My goal with this image was to present these nebulae in a unique way.  I tried to frame the image to give both subjects equal weight in order to balance it out.  This is basically an SHO pallet with some blending in the red and green channels.  I did however, decide to enhance the O3 data with some of the strong blue signal that was present in the scant 20 minutes of RGB data that was collected for star colors.    The blue that is visible in the Flaming Star is not an O3 emission signal as it is in the Tadpoles.  In the Flaming Star, it is actually blue light from AE Aurigae being reflected off nearby interstellar matter and therefore shows up much more in the blue data vs the O3 data.  I thought that this was an important feature to bring into the image and was a fun challenge to figure out how.

Sadly, my season is coming to a close in South Florida.  These beautiful nebulae are on their way out West and imaging broadband under a Bortle 8 sky during Galaxy season is hard work.  It is difficult to get crisp images and my never ending battle with internal reflections in my C11HD makes processing them that much more difficult.  And by May, I am pretty much shut down by the weather for the summer.

So, I have decided to deploy a new telescope in a remote site.  I have been planning this project for a year now, and I will be soon imaging from a dark site with a TOA-150.  Stay tuned!

CS