I have always wanted to hit this beautiful field since first seeing this object in Marco Lorenzi's amazing ROG APOTY shortlisted image, it blew my mind, I didn't know it existed...
That was back in 2012-13...so now finally it is my turn
This was taken over 5 nights for a total of over 25hrs exposure time. I was pretty happy with this, as this time of year we only get 6 hours of astronomical darkness to shoot with each night, so when you factor in manual focus checks, dither re-aquires after every exposure, sub frame image download times, manual meridian flip, etc, that's good productive imaging, for a non automated, manual dome turning, manual meridian flip and re aquire (no plate solving etc) kinda guy
and I threw out not a single sub exposure after all that!!
...did drink some beer though
Sitting in a rich field of OIII and Halpha emission nebulae, a remarkable and beautiful, striated, teal coloured, almost perfectly spherical, bubble, is being blown in the interstellar medium by the intense stellar wind from a very hot and massive Wolf-Rayet star at its centre. Wolf-Rayet stars have surface temperatures of between 30 000K and 210 000 K, compared to our Sun, which has a surface temperature of just 5800K!
SH2-308 in Canis Major (click on image to enlarge and pan around with your cursor)
If you must pixel peep (or just wanna check out the amazing pin point field of the FSQ106EDX4 across the 52mm diagonal sensor
) the full size full res jpeg is
HERE
Hope you like it and all imaging details are in the blurb under the image