Dark Nebula - The Horsehead Nebula Barnard 33 - in the Constellation Orion

 

The Horsehead Nebula - 66mm Altair Lightwave ED refractor. Image Credit: Kurt Thrust.

"The weather in Lowestoft has taken for the better and we have experienced a short run of clear and steady nights. The JPO team has been busy testing the Seestar S30 and Pip Stackert is beginning to get used to the processing adjustments, which better suit the high number of 10 second duration subs that have to be stacked, cropped  and processed.

Whilst all this was going on, our Director, Kurt Thrust, took time out to capture an hour of 'early evening' data whilst the constellation Orion was due South. He used the Observatory Star Adventurer mini-rig, which is reasonably quick to set up and get photon catching. The camera used was an astro-modded Canon 200d DSLR with a clip in Altair Triband filter. 

The Horsehead Nebula is created by an enormous cloud of dense dust that is seen in silhouette against the backdrop of a bright emission nebula, which permeates much of the constellation Orion. The bright multi star system,  Alnitak, many times larger and brighter than our Sun - +30 times more massive, can be seen upper middle left in this image. For the keen eyed, you just might detect that the star shape is slightly deformed to its left by its largest and brightest sibling star. Before we stretched the illumination levels of this image, to bring out the fainter nebulosity, the sibling could be clearly resolved from its larger and brighter brother Alnitak. We were all surprised that such a small aperture telescope could pull this feat off! 

The very bright emission nebula NGC 2024 or The Flame Nebula, may be seen below Alnitak. The dark 'veins', so obvious in our image, are created by dust clouds between us and the bright emission nebula.

Emission nebulae are created by bright hot stars ionising clouds of gas, ie. energising electrons in the gas atoms, and as these atoms return to their initial or ground state, they release photons at specific wavelengths. At the JPO we do our best to 'catch them' as they fly our way!

We hope to post some of the Seestar S30 data in the near future. Fingers-crossed, the weather continues set fair. 

As a future project, we hope to use the Seestar S30 to create a three pane image of the Markarian Chain of Galaxies in the constellation Virgo". - Joel Cairo CEO of the Jodrell Plank Observatory.

The Horsehead and the Flame Nebula.

 

The Horsehead and Flame Nebulae. Old data captured at the Jodrell Plank Observatory re-worked using Starnet GUI and Affinity Photo software by Pip Stakkert.

" Probably my favourite star field in the the winter night sky. The constellation Orion can now be seen rising each night in the east and dominating the winter night sky when we looked to the south. The above image highlights the bright star Alnitak (centre left) which is the left star in Orion's Belt of three 'naked eye' stars. If you look closely you will see that Alnitak is a double star with a small companion. Below and to the left of Alnitak is the Flame Nebula a vast cloud of ionised hydrogen gas crossed by dark lanes of cold interstellar dust. The dark Horsehead Nebula is also an area of  cold dust that sits between us and the ionised gas behind it creating the iconic equine silhouette. Given some better weather on a Moon free night, we will endeavour to capture some more data in and around the fabulous constellation Orion." - Kurt Thrust current Director of the Jodrell Plank Observatory.

Credit for Star Map - FreeStarCharts.com