Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cassiopeia (Cas)  ·  Contains:  IC 1805
IC1805 Heart of the Heart Nebula, Joe Niemeyer
IC1805 Heart of the Heart Nebula
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IC1805 Heart of the Heart Nebula

IC1805 Heart of the Heart Nebula, Joe Niemeyer
IC1805 Heart of the Heart Nebula
Powered byPixInsight

IC1805 Heart of the Heart Nebula

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Description

This is my image of the central portion of the Heart Nebula (IC 1805) featuring the Melotte 15 open star cluster surrounding huge pillars of dust and gas. The hot young stars in Melotte 15 have masses about 50 times that of our Sun. I really love the contrast and detail in this image. The entire Heart Nebula is too large to fit all of it in my telescope's field of view, but you can see the outlines of the heart shape on the periphery of this image. It occupies a field 4 times the diameter of a full moon and is 7500 light-years from Earth in Cassiopeia. IC 1805 has the distinctive red coloring of an emission nebula composed of ionized hydrogen radiated by the central open star cluster. And it is adjacent to the Soul Nebula which will be the subject of my next astro photo. These two nebulae together are referred to as the Heart and Soul Nebulae.

I made this image from the best of 34 300-second exposures through my Baader dual-bandpass filter (Hα and OIII) at 1630mm focal length (0.7X reducer), calibrated with 20 each dark, flat, and dark flat frames. I stacked the frames with Astro Pixel Processor and post-processed with Photoshop utilizing the StarXTerminator, Astronomy Tools, and Topaz DeNoise AI plugins.

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IC1805 Heart of the Heart Nebula, Joe Niemeyer