This week I’m continuing my exploration of the humongous winter sky (as viewed from the northern hemisphere) objects with an image of the Angelfish Nebula setting at Morton’s Overlook.  The Angelfish Nebula (or SH2-264 is its scientific name) is situated as the “head” of Orion, and was nicknamed the Angelfish Nebula because of its resemblance to an angelfish.  Since first observing this object I’ve wanted to take a deeper look at it, which then inspired an even deeper look!  This particular image was captured at 100mm.

As I was looking at the nebula, I was captured by right most portion of the “fin” that points up, there’s a shape that looks sort of like an upside down heart.  It just looked like a really cool detail.  I setup in my backyard and tried to shoot it much tighter, just to see if I could, and ended up failing miserably.  My new setup is going to need some work.  Anyway, as luck would have it Telescope Live already had data for exactly what I had been looking at!  I downloaded the data and processed it so you can see the image below in the Alternative Perspective section. 

Here’s what I found interesting though, and humor me for just a minute in a technical discussion.  To capture these objects I have to use specialized filters so that I’m block portions of the light spectrum so that my camera is only “seeing” the light I want it to see.  As you would guess, this means there is light that is naturally there, but gets missed because it’s filtered out.  As is the case here, there is this beautiful brown dust all around this object, and a really interesting bright cloud in the center of that heart shape, but you don’t see it in my image above because it got filtered out.  If you scroll on down to the second image in the Alternative Perspective section, you’ll see the hydrogen alpha (reds) filtered view, and note that all those structures are gone!  If you compare that bottom-most image, with the image above, you’ll note that they look more similar, and that’s because the filtering is close to the same.  Pretty fascinating stuff!

More next week!

–Dan Thompson