I first imaged this deep sky object in 2023 using my one shot colour camera, and I remember the seeing being very good that evening. This is my longest integration so far on this object in our night sky! But the image below was taken in 2024.
Total Integration time: 23 hours 25 min
Moon coverage: 80%
Location: Northern Hemisphere
Bortle: 4
The heart of the heart nebula:
The Heart Nebula or Melotte 15 is an emission nebula, 7500 light years away from Earth and located in the Perseus Arm of the Galaxy in the constellation Cassiopeia. Other object sthatare in this contellation include the Pac-man nebula and more.
Melotte 15 was discovered by William Herschel on 3 November 1787. It displays glowing ionised hydrogen gas and darker dust lanes. Source Wikipedia
I absolutely love this deep sky object in our night skies. The details I have managed to tease out from over 23 hours worth of image time is crazy. The dark dust structures, the faint dark nebulous details and the gaseous pillars simply blows my mind!
The indiviudal images shown below are what are called master lights and these are output from the astro software. I will then combine these to produce the image that you see above.
The blue colour tends to signify oxygen, the red, hydrogen in the visisble spectrum of colours, and I am pretty sure there are a vast range of colours in here we can't actually see beyond the visible spectrum. UV, IR and more!
Shown above are what the individual master images or master lights look like when I process them in Pixinsight. These individual master frames were produced by digitally stacking lots and lots of exposures to combine in to one master frame. When I combine these master lights they make one full colour image as you can see on the last image above.
I then process this image to produce the deep sky image you see below. It all sounds very complex, but once you get used to using the software for a while it gets a little easier to do. Promise :-) Pixinsight does have a huge learning curve however!
The image above is a close tight crop on the same object, Melotte 15 but cropped and processed again using something called drizzling which essentialy increases the overall images size. I then use a feature in the Pixinsight software called drop shrinking which then reduces the overall pixel size to make the image feel sharper overall.
I was so lucky, as this image was picked for image of the day on the ZWO astronomy app!
I hope you enjoy seeing my space images.
Comments