"Heart" IC1805, "Soul" IC1848. IC1795 is the bright right hand extension to IC1805, and the brightest part of that is NGC896...
Oh, and for some reason the "Soul's" head is separately catalogued as IC1871.
Description
The picture above holds a special meaning for me. The "Soul" nebula of this pair is also know
variously as "baby", "fetus" and "embryo" - which seem more apropos to me, but that's possibly
because, by a wonderful coincidence, my lovely wife Kristie informed me she was pregnant
the day after this imaging run. The reminicent fetal shape of the nebula is about as clear
as Webber's images were in his sonograms ;-)
The forms of these nebulae have been blown and hollowed out by the combined solar winds
of the clusters of hot young stars born and embedded within them - the "torso" of the baby and the
left and right "chambers" of the heart show this effect. You can get a sense of the scale of this
image by realizing that the full moon would cover approximately the same area as the babies head.
The nebulae are however about 6000 light years away from us, and about 300 light years from side to side.
If you know where to look between and below the nebulae, you can just make out the very faint smudges that
correspond to the Maffei I and II galaxies.
Maffei II is only barely above the noise floor. These two galaxies
are viewed through the obscuring clouds of our milkyway and are only visible in the near infrared. There is just
enough signal in this Ha filtered image to make them visible. These objects were only confirmed as galaxies in the 1970s,
previously they were erroneously catalogued as nebula.
Below you can see another rendition of the Heart & Soul, but in natural light rather than Ha filtered.
Technical Details
Date(s)
17th August 2005, 00:20-05:19
Location
Old Dome Observatory, Bourn, Cambridge, UK
Environment
4C, clear with very occasional small low cloud, very slight breeze, full harvest moon
As above, but in natural light. An IDAS filter was used to help reduce the impact of local light pollution.
At some point I should probably try and combine the two images into a HaRGB composite.
Interesting to note that some of the faint low level nebulosity at the top and bottom right differs between the two.
This is possibly due to moonlight pollution on the Ha image as that was taken during a full moon.
The nebulosity captured at the top right in this natural colour image is the edge of IC1831, a large faint nebulous area.
Technical Details
Date(s)
27th October 2006, 00:00
Location
Old Dome Observatory, Bourn, Cambridge, UK
Environment
7C, relatively clear with occasional small low cloud, reasonable breeze, no moon
Calibrated, aligned and stacked in ImagesPlus, processed in Photoshop CS
Notes
This lens is acceptable wide open at F/1.8 for Ha images,
but does suffer from some chromatic aberration in natural light and really should be stopped down a little.
