Spaghetti Nebula in H-Light (M.J. Post)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Taurus (Tau) · Contains: LBN 822 · Sh2-240

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Spaghetti Nebula in H-Light

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Spaghetti Nebula in H-Light

Here is one of my favorite objects, the Spaghetti Nebula, a huge supernova remnant that lies high in the sky near constellations Taurus. It was not discovered until 1952 by a team from Crimea, probably using a wide-field telescope captured from the Germans in WWII. It is about 3000 light years away, 160 light years in diameter, and 40,000 years old. Because it has expanded for so long it is extremely faint and has grown to 3 degrees in diameter, encompassing about 40 full moons. It was also cataloged by Stewart Sharpless as SH2-240. At its heart lies a fast-spinning neutron star, still a strong radio source.

I needed six panels to capture this wonder in its entirety using my shortest focal length scope (980-mm). The composite tiff file is 1.7 GB in size, too large for Astrobin. So I added Gaussian blur and saved at lowest possible quality as a jpeg to reach the size limit. Each of the six panels resulted from 3.5 hours of exposure time through the Officina RH350AT scope, about 21 hours total time.

This image is an RGB image but it uses only only H-alpha light (red). That is a shame because there are many nice highlights in teal from O III. I simply cannot get my H- and O- composites to line up so I had to abandon the O-light image. Here the Red channel is the starless H image plus stars only in H-light. Green and Blue channels are stars only in H-light.

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The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5501334
PixInsight job	XXUHII1ZMA7S6TMNWD7Y91QWVLPLRH85
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	05h40m36s.65
RA (top/left)	05h49m25s.20
RA (top/right)	05h31m56s.25
RA (bottom/right)	05h32m09s.40
RA (bottom/left)	05h48m59s.20

Dec (center)	+28°02′10″.4
Dec (top/left)	+29°48′21″.1
Dec (top/right)	+29°48′32″.4
Dec (bottom/right)	+26°14′40″.9
Dec (bottom/left)	+26°12′49″.3

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Spaghetti Nebula in H-Light

Spaghetti Nebula in H-Light

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Spaghetti Nebula in H-Light

Spaghetti Nebula in H-Light

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