Observations of IC410
These are the observations available for IC410. If you have any of your own that you'd like to submit we'd love to put them on the website.
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The Tadpole Nebula (IC410) in Auriga
Observing in the UK has been hampered by very poor weather for weeks. But, through January and February, I eventually managed to collect sufficient data on IC 410, The Tadpole Nebula. IC 410 is often depicted using narrowband data but I wanted to see what I could achieve in 'natural' RGB light.
Around 12,000 light-years away, in the constellation of Auriga, drifting clouds of gases are condensing into clusters of new stars. The hot young stars in these clusters ionise the gases, making them glow, and sculpt fascinating shapes by their energetic radiation.
One such star cluster, designated NGC 1893, formed around 4 million years ago and sits at the heart of such an emission nebula, IC 410, which is around 100 light-years across. In the image below, at the upper-left of the centre, two strange tadpole-shaped structures show where the radiation from new stars is causing the surrounding gas to glow, forming bright ridges of gas, the heads, while cooler gas streams away forming familiar tail-like shapes and giving rise to the nebula's nickname.
The star cluster, NGC 1893, was discovered in 1827 by John Herschel, but the surrounding nebula IC 410 was not detected until 1892, by the German astronomer and astrophotographer Max Wolf. Foreground dust and gas reduce the clarity of the nebula, something which I became aware of during the processing of the image.
This image of the Tadpole Nebula (IC410) in Auriga was provided by David Davies and taken from Cambridge in the UK. To see more of David's work please visit his Flickr Photostream. Click on the image for the larger version. Image Details
- Telescope: 200mm Ritchey-Chretien with a 0.7x reducer.
- Camera: QSI 683 plus a Lodestar off-axis guide camera.
- Mount: Skywatcher EQ8.
The image is an HaLRGB composition. It comprises 30 x five-minutes of luminance and 15 x five-minutes of each RGB. I also collected 10 x 20-minutes of hydrogen-alpha data and applied a small fraction of it as an additional luminance layer to help bring out the subtle structures in the nebula. Image acquisition with NINA; image processing with Deep Sky Stacker, Pixinsight and Photoshop.
David Davies - (25 February 2021).
