Scarlet Lightning
Know to astronomers as the Spaghetti Nebula, it is a large supernova remnant straddling the border between the constellations Auriga and Taurus. The glowing gas filaments cover nearly 3 degrees of the sky, a cloud of stellar debris that is about 150 light years across. The explosion occurred about 40,000 years ago, the light reaching Earth a few thousand years later. A spinning neutron star or pulsar is all that remains of the original star’s core.
In this image I combined hydrogen emission with visible light (RGB). The exposures were collected over a four week period in November and December 2019, during three clear nights between rain storms. This is one of the faintest objects that I have attempted. I found that I needed to collect more than 25 hours of hydrogen exposures to visualize the detail and control the noise in this object.
20.8 hours total exposure of ionized hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur emissions
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