Heart and Soul Nebula
The Heart Nebula, IC 1805, Sharpless 2-190, is located in the Perseus Arm of the Galaxy in the constellation Cassiopeia. It was discovered by William Herschel on 3 November 1787. It is an emission nebula showing glowing ionized hydrogen gas and darker dust lanes.
The Soul Nebula, Westerhout 5, Sharpless 2-199, is also an emission nebula located in Cassiopeia. Several small open clusters are embedded in the nebula. The object is more commonly called by the cluster designation IC 1848.
This complex of the two are often mentioned together as the "Heart and Soul". The image covers an area of the sky over ten times as wide as the full moon and eight times as high (5.0 x 3.3 degrees) in the constellation Cassiopeia.
Located about 6,000 light-years from Earth, the Heart and Soul nebulae form a vast star-forming complex that makes up part of the Perseus spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. The nebula to the right is the Heart, designated IC 1805 and named after its resemblance to a human heart. To the left is the Soul nebula, also known as the Embryo nebula, IC 1848 or W5. The Perseus arm lies further from the center of the Milky Way than the arm that contains our sun. The Heart and Soul nebulae stretch out nearly 580 light-years across, covering a small portion of the diameter of the Milky Way, which is roughly 100,000 light-years across.
The two nebulae are both massive star-making factories, marked by giant bubbles that were blown into surrounding dust by radiation and winds from the stars.
Acquisition and processing
I used this small setup in the front for imaging. It's the TS61-EDPHII with the QHY168C camera attached (on the picture it's the ASI1600MM). It gives a nice field of view of about 5°x3.3°. I took about 120 frames of 180" each and had to throw away only about 16. So it's an integration time of 5.2 hrs, 104x180". Integration was done in APP and processing in PI. Date captured, September 8th, 2021.
I've made this image with a 2 mosaic panel during the night of September 16th 2021. During the night the transparency must have been different because there's still a very little gradient difference between the two panels that I couldn't process away. The subframes were all at 300" with the SII, OIII and Ha Astronomik 6nm filters. Camera setting for the ASI1600MMc at 139 gain and 21 offset. The telescope used was again the marvelous TS61-EDPII on a Celestron AVX mount. This lower end mount is ok, but quite a challenge to get guiding and tracking between limits. On average the guiding error was between 1.00" and 1.50" which for this image scale of 2.86"/pixel is actually not too bad.
This is the simple stretched integrated Ha-image using MaskedStretch in PixInsight. Two panel mosaic is made with Astro Pixel Processor and the subframes were taken witg N.I.NA. Nightly Build 1.11 #147
