Ok, So I Finished The Processing Of My New Photo Of The Flaming Star Nebula (IC 405)

Here's another black and white picture taken in H-alpha, this time of the Pacman nebula (NGC 281). I don't have a lot to say about this one, it's a hydrogen gas cloud similar to the gas cloud around Sadr that I previously photographed. An interesting thing about it thought, is its position, it's about 6 500 light years from us and about 1000 light years above the galactic plane, making it a prominent target to study star formation. The cluster of stars at the center of the nebulas is a good example of those newly borne stars as it is only about 3.5 million years old.

Ok, so I was searching for information on some of the objects visible in my photo of the horse head nebula and I found these two posts (Reddit and Astrobin) by DanielZoliro that also used a SII and Ha combination but with a slightly different processing (Notably, the RGB combination being R: SII, G: 0.6xHa + 0.4xSII, B: Ha). I loved his results and I had to try it with my own data. Did turn out great, but there was a reflection of a star on the SII data and this processing amplified it (the big reddish round/donut thing on right of the full image).

(Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera and Baader 6.5nm SHO filter. 5x120s image for each colour filter (RGB), 22x300s for the Ha filter and 32x300s for the SII filter, total imaging time 5h, stacking and processing done in PixInsight.)

I took another photo of the crescent nebula (C27) this time using my monochrome camera and processed similarly to my photos of the veil nebula. The H-alpha photos really helped to enhance the ionised hydrogen present in this region of space (deep red clouds in the background). Still not completely satisfied with how the stars turned out (too much halo visible around them), could have been mitigated if the clouds had not come half way through the imaging session or if I do another night of imaging of this target.

Ok, so I needed a bit of help from a friend who know more about this than me (unfortunately my knowledge of computer science is very limited). He suggested to try base64 since this string ended with a ''='' signe (he said it indicates padding if all the bits don't aligne perfectly at the end in this encoding schemes) and had both lower and upper case letters.

the translation from base64 gave : FGS: Thi& is Fleeting Green Sunsets. Can anyone read me?

I must wonder: have you ever encountered a failed broadcast, corrupted or otherwise?

TSAC: Corrupted broadcasts are commonplace. They often occur as a result of interruptions during radio transmissions, caused either by environmental factors or damage to associated communications arrays.

If a communications tower fails to transmit a message for one reason or another, the data is dumped into a local storage medium (usually a pearl) for the sake of preservation. The data then needs to be retrieved manually by an Overseer in order to be recovered.

Data recovery subroutines can be used to reconstruct partial transmissions, but broadcasts caused by faulty or decaying equipment often become corrupted. I usually ignore these signals. However, occasionally an abnormal broadcast will catch my attention.

An Overseer of mine patrolling the nearby long-range communications spires retrieved one such broadcast rather recently...

[ OUTGOING REQUEST ] COMMUNICATIONS MANIFEST [[ERROR]] UNABLE TO SEND - Malformed Message Header SOURCE NODE TRACE: (NULL)_ROOT, (NULL)_COMM06, 464753_SPIRE02 || DESTINATION: (NULL)unknown group MESSAGE CONTENTS: --- FATAL EXCEPTION: UNABLE TO RENDER MESSAGE CONTENTS INVALID SYMBOL AT LINE 01, SEQUENCE 08. LINE 03 MISSING TERMINATING EXPRESSION. == BROADCAST IS CORRUPTED. == ATTEMPTING RECOVERY. PARTIAL BROADCAST RECOVERY SUCCESSFUL. RAW CONTENTS: 01010010011010110110010001010100010011110110100101000010010101010110000101000111011010110110110101001001010001110110110001111010010010010100010101011010011100110101101001010111010101100011000001100001010101110011010101101110010010010100010101100100011110010101101001010111010101100111010101001001010001100100111000110001011000100110111001001110011011000110010001001000010011010111010101001001010001010100111001101000011000100110100101000010011010000110001001101110011011000111011001100010011011010101010101100111011000110110110101010110011010000101101001000011010000100111010001011010010101000011100000111101 [ Pending upload by dispatched Overseer. Unit will enter read-only state in 146 cycles. ]

This is the heart nebula (or at least as much of it as I can take with my setup without doing a mosaic) also known as IC 1805 or NGC 896. It is around 7 000 light years from us, in the constellation Cassiopeia. Despite its distance to us it still appears about twice as big as the moon in the sky, which speaks volumes when it comes to its actual size (about 200 light years in diameter).

This being an emission nebula its light mostly comes from gasses ionised by nearby stars.

This nebula also has an open cluster at it's center (a bit closer to us than the rest of the nebula), Melotte 15:

This cluster is bout 1,5 million years old which is very young for such a stellar object. It is composed a a few very heavy and bright stars and many fainter lighter stars.

The starless version :

(Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera and Baader 6.5nm narrowband filter. 25x300s for the Ha filter, 26x300s for the SII filter and 26x300s for the OIII filter, total imaging time 6h 25min, stacking and processing done in PixInsight. Photo taken mid-January) Other versions with a different colour combinations (a bit less pleased of how they turned out).

If you want to see the nebula in its entirety, you can check out this NASA Astronomy picture of the day made by Adam Jensen.

This is a picture of the hydrogen and dust cloud surrounding the star Sadr (the bright white dot near the center) also known as IC 1318. The bright parts represent hydrogen clouds and the dark parts dust clouds. Those types of clouds are the birthplace of new stars. This particular photo is in black and white because it was made by using a filter that lets only the light emitted by ionised hydrogen (the H alpha spectral line) pass through it. This increases the visibility of the hydrogen clouds. Since this light is at 656 nm, it would appear bright red if coloured. Together with H beta (496 nm) also from hydrogen and O III (around 500 nm) from oxygen both cyan in color, they represent the majority of light emitted by gas clouds. So in conclusion if you were able to see this gas cloud directly it would appear a reddish-magenta color (H alpha being the dominant emission).

Photo of Pickering's triangle (also known as Fleming's triangle) and NGC 6979 / NGC 6974 (the more diffused clouds at the top center/left). This is the third part of the Cygnus loop / veil nebula, this part of the supernova remnant is fainter than the previous two parts of the loop I photographed. This explains in part why it was only discovered by in 1904 by Williamina Fleming (whereas the two writer part were discovered in 1784 by William Herschel). Williamina Fleming was a pioneer in stellar classification, she worked with other women at the Harvard college observatory. Their work in star classification resulted in the Henry Draper Catalogue, an extensive (225 300 stars in the first edition) classification of stars with their position and their spectra. Williamina is also credited with the discovery of 59 nebula (including the famous hors head nebula) more than 300 variable stars as well as (with Henry Norris Russell and Edward Charles Pickering) the discovery of white dwarfs (the remnants of dead sun-like stars).

II took another photo of M51 / the whirlpool galaxy, same camera and same processing of the data, but I used a different (bigger) telescope. Here, using a bigger telescope has two major effects, firstly the image is more ''zoomed in'' since the focal length is longer. Secondly, since the diameter is bigger the maximal (angular) resolution of the image can be increased. This increase in resolution is due to the way the waves of light are diffracted by the aperture of the optical instrument (in short bigger aperture = better resolution). This increase in resolution is one of the reasons professional telescopes have gigantic mirrors and/or use telescope arrays combined with interferometry to increase their maximal angular resolution.

I think one big reason why we don't consider the stars as important as before (not even pop-astrology anymore cares about the stars or the sky on itself, just the signs deprived of context) is because of light pollution.

For most of human history the sky looked between 1-3, 4 at most. And then all of a sudden with electrification it was gone (I'm lucky if I get 6 in my small city). The first time I saw the Milky Way fully as a kid was a spiritual experience, I was almost scared on how BRIGHT it was, it felt like someone was looking back at me. You don't get that at all with modern light pollution.

When most people talk about stargazing nowadays they think about watching about a couple of bright dots. The stars are really, really not like that. The unpolluted night sky is a festival of fireworks. There is nothing like it.