Impressing the judges with “excellent, visually stunning” work, Rouzbeh Bidshahri wins the title of Photo of the Week on November 19, 2021 with a crisp picture of IC 1805.
Also known as the Heart Nebula, IC 1805 is a large emission nebula that sits about 7,500 light-years away in the constellation of Cassiopeia. NASA states that its most prominent element is hydrogen.
At the heart of the nebula lies the open star cluster Melotte 15, young stars that are eroding dust pillars with their energetic light and winds. NASA also states he cluster contains a few bright stars nearly 50 times the mass of our Sun, many dim stars only a fraction of the mass of our Sun, and an absent microquasar that was expelled millions of years ago.
Bidshahri said a Planewave CDK 12.5 telescope was used to capture the nebula along with a QHYCCD 268M camera. Bidshahri captured a total of 15 hours and 45 minutes of data from the outskirts of Vancouver, British Columbia at the end of October. Bidshahri used 3nm ultra-narrowband filters, displaying the sulphur, hydrogen and oxygen data with a modified SHO “Hubble” palette.
More details are available here on Bidshahri’s Astrobin page.
Chris Parfett won an honourable mention this week with his image of Messier 33, the Triangulum Galaxy.
This spiral galaxy is located in the constellation Triangulum and is the third-largest member of our Local Group of galaxies following the Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31) and the Milky Way. Sitting 2.73 million light-years away from the Solar System, NASA states that the galaxy’s orderly spiral structure displays few signs of interactions with nearby galaxies.
“This galaxy is usually on people’s to do lists,” Parfett said. “It was high on mine after starting astrophotography; right after M31, it was second up.”
Parfett said to produce this image, he captured 13 hours and 20 minutes of data over three nights: one night for red-green-blue data, another for Hydrogen-alpha and the last for luminance data. He used a ZWO ASI294MM and MC Pro as well as a William Optics Gran Turismo 102 (f/6.9) to collect it.
“My 2020 M33 was lacking in a few ways, and I was really looking forward to coming back to it for brand new data in 2021,” he said.
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