21
Feb
2022
IC405 - The flaming star nebula really does its name justice!
The result of over 20h of total exposure time (taken over the course of a month). This is definitely one of my biggest / longest imaging projects so far!
This nebula is classified as both, an emission nebula and a reflection nebula. Surrounding the bright / variable star “AE Aurigae”, it shines with a magnitude of +6.0 and lays around 1500 light years away from earth.
The above photo is a narrowband photo in the HSO palette (meaning red = hydrogen, green = sulfur and blue = oxygen). Like in most nebulas, hydrogen dominates the elements and gives it a reddish look (the H-alpha line is 656nm, or what we as humans would perceive as red).
An alternative palette is the Hubble palette, assigning the different emission lines of the chemical elements to the RGB channels a bit differently (and is mostly used by the hubble telescope):