The Heart Nebula, IC 1805, Sharpless
2-190, is some 7500 light years away from Earth and is located
in the Perseus Arm of the Galaxy in
the constellation Cassiopeia. It was discovered by William Herschel on
3 November 1787. It is an emission nebula showing
glowing ionized hydrogen gas and darker dust lanes.
The brightest part of the nebula (a knot at its western edge) is separately
classified as NGC 896, because it was the first part of the nebula to be
discovered. The nebula's intense red output and its
morphology are driven by the radiation emanating from a small group of stars
near the nebula's center. This open cluster of
stars, known as Collinder 26 or 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.
The Heart Nebula is also made up of ionised Oxygen and Sulfur gasses, responsible for the rich blue and orange colours seen in narrowband images. The shape of the nebula is driven by stellar winds from the hot stars in its core. The nebula also spans almost 2 degrees in the sky, covering an area four times that of the diameter of the full moon.
The image data was taken at Okie-Tex 2021 near Kenton, Oklahoma. The above image has IC1805, center, and NGC896, upper right, captured with a one shot color camera a StarLight Xpress SXVR M 25C. The image is made of 24 ten-minute exposures using AstroArt 7 then calibrated, combined and processed using AstroArt8. The camera was mounted to a AstroTech AT72ED refractor. The guiding setup was a ZWO ASI120 attached to a SVBONY SV106 guide scope piggybacked on the AT72ED. The imaging setup was mounted on an Astro Physics AP900. Guiding software was PHD2.
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