Object: The Heart Nebula, IC 1805, Sharpless 2-190, lies some 7500 light-years away from Earth and is in the Perseus Arm of the Galaxy in the constellation Cassiopeia. It was discovered by William Herschel on 3 November 1787. This is an emission nebula showing glowing ionized hydrogen gas and darker dust lanes.
The very brightest part of this nebula is separately classified as NGC 896, because it was the first part of this nebula to be discovered.
The nebula’s intense color output and its configuration are driven by the radiation emanating from a small group of stars near the nebula’s center.
This open cluster of stars known as Melotte 15 contains a few bright stars nearly 50 times the mass of our Sun, and many more dim stars that are only a fraction of our Sun’s mass.
This image was captured in narrowband with a one-sho-color camera using the Radian Triad Quadband filter.
Taken: November 11, 2020
Telescope: Skywatcher Esprit 80 ED Triplet APO Refractor
Mount: Paramount ME II unguided
Camera: ZWO ASI1600MC-Pro (cooled to -10C; unity gain) Bin 1×1.
Focuser: Starizona Micro Touch Autofocuser
Rotator: Optec Pixys LE camera field rotator
Filters used: Radian Triad Ultra Quad Narrowband
Exposures: 54×240 sec. for a total exposure time of 3.6 hours; calibrated with 40 dark frames, 40 flat frames with 40 dark-flats
Seeing Conditions:
Acquired using Sequence Generator Pro 3 and TheSkyX
Processed with PixInsight and Photoshop CC 2021 (Weighted Batch Pre-processing script used for calibration, evaluation, registration, and integration of subframes)