The Great Nebula in Carina.
This behemoth of a nebula is located ~9,000 light-years away, and spans ~100 light-years across, making this nebula ~4 times larger than the Orion Nebula as seen from our place in the universe. The Carina nebula is an intense and violently active star-forming region that gets it's characteristic red and purple colours from the interaction of intense UV light with the hot hydrogen gas.
This nebula hosts one of our galaxies most impressive stars we know about, Eta Carinae. This star is >100x the size of our sun and shines ~4,000,000x brighter, making it one of the most luminous on record. Eta Carinae is highly unstable and prone to violent outbursts; most notably, a "false supernova" event that occurred in 1843. This false supernova event created the Homunculus Nebula, 2 spherical lobes of gas thrown off the star.
This is a 4-panel Mosaic in HOO, I've stacked and processed this as a Drizzle 2x image (for a full size resolution of just under 300Mp), but have reduced the resolution back to the native resolution for upload and viewing. To put that in context, i can make a print of this, with the long edge a little taller than me, at 300dpi.
Taken with a 2600MM through Antlia Filters behind the Takahashi FSQ-106ED on the AP1200GTO.
Per Panel:
48x300s Ha, 48x300s O3
60x15s R, 60x15s G, 60x15s B (for the stars)
Given that my weather is not likely to let me image again for a while, I figured I had better process what I've already got. Once I'm back imaging, I intend on adding 48x300s S2 to each panel, and if the motivation strikes, I'll also add a full suite of LRGB as well.
Be Sure to check it out on Astrobin!
