Chris Parfett’s image of the colourful, young stellar nursery NGC 1333 wins our Photo of the Week title for October 29, 2021.

NGC 1333 is a reflection nebula located 1,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Perseus. It’s a stellar nursery, an area where new stars for forming. The region contains hundreds of stars less than a million years old, most still hidden from optical telescopes by stardust.

“The nebula is visible as a hazy patch in a small telescope, while a larger aperture will show a pair of dark nebulae designated Barnard 1 and Barnard 2,” Parfett wrote.

Parfett said he spent three nights in October 2021 collecting the data for the image from his front yard in Bittern Lake, Alberta. The red, green and blue data was collected with a ZWO ASI294MC Pro, and about 7.5 hours of luminance data was collected with a ZWO ASI294MM Pro. Total integration time was about 12 hours. The telescope was a William Optics GT 102 (f/6.9).

Jason Dain’s clear shot of the Pacman Nebula captured our honourable mention this week.

Also known as NGC 281, the emission nebula holds the open star cluster IC 1590, and was first identified in 1883 by astronomer E.E. Barnard. Located in Cassiopeia and part of the Milky Way’s Perseus Spiral Arm, estimates published in 2014 put the object about 9,200 light-years away from Earth.

Dain noted that traditional Hubble palette narrowband combinations map sulphur to red, hydrogen to green and oxygen to blue. For this narrowband image of the Pacman Nebula, Dain used Foraxx’s dynamic combination which blends the channels in different ways to get the resulting image. Dain said he followed this article to make this image.

Dain said he used a ZWO ASI294MM on an Explore Scientific 127mm carbon fibre telescope (f/7.5). He collected 18 hours of data in October 2021 from Stillwater Lake, Nova Scotia.