Now that I’m living in abundance of dark skies, I’ve had another chance to dabble in a bit of deep sky astrophotography.
This bright and colourful object is NGC 3372. More commonly known as The Carina Nebula, being associated with the southern constellation Carina, meaning “The Keel”(of a ship) in Latin.
Carina is a large emission Nebula which during good conditions, can be seen with the naked eye.
It’s estimated distance from earth is around 7500 light years, and spans near 460 light years in diameter.
It is one of the largest know star forming regions of the Milky Way galaxy, and has been the site of several supernova explosions.
It is home to several open star clusters.
The bright cental star in the Nebula is known as Eta Carinae, a luminous Supergiant roughly 4 million times brighter, and 100-150 times more massive than our sun.
The luminous clouds of the nebula are caused by the ionization of interstellar gas and dust.
In the case of Carina’s red emission, high intendity U.V. radiation given off by a newly born star, causes the Hydrogen atoms (HII) in the cloud to emit a photon of a specific wavelength.
In this case, 656.28nm, or in other words; red.
The spectrum of light emitted depends on the element composition of the clouds and their level of ionization.
This image was shot using an unmodified #Sony #A7S with 70-200 f4 lens @200mm & f4.5.
9 tracked 2 minute exposures @ISO2500, stacked using Sequator and developed in Photoshop and Lightroom.
No dark, bias or flat frames.
Enjoy! 😁
