IC 410 is a faint emission nebula in Auriga and NGC 1893 is the open cluster in its centre. The name The Tadpole Nebula may seem an odd name for this nebula; it comes from two very small features which barely show in my picture below (move your mouse pointer over the image to see them indicated), but they are clearly shown in this APOD picture (which is up side down compared to my image). NGC 1893 is the cluster of stars at the centre of the nebula. These stars are emerging from, and are responsible for the excitation of, the nebula.
The system is 12,000 light years away and the nebula subtends about 30 arc-minutes which makes it about 100 light years across. The stars of the cluster are very young at about 10 million years.
This is false-colour image, made from exposures using Hα, OIII narrow-band filters and the blue filter from the RGB set. Five individual images at each wavelength were stacked and then combined to form the colour image. Hα was used in the red channel and OIII in the green.
Date and Time: 12th November 2015 04:00 to 05:48 UT
Camera: Starlight Xpress MX716
Telescope: ST80 with Astronomik filters
Capture: Starlight star_mx7, 5-minute exposure for the narrow-band filters, 1 minute for the blue filter.
Processing: Starlight star_mx7. Auto-background, non-linear stretch factor 25, auto-background.
Irfanview. Conversion to bmp.
Custom software. Dark subtraction.
PhotoImpact and Focus Magic. Removal of the effect of drift.
RegiStax5. Alignment, stacking and assembly of RGB.
PhotoImpact. Gamma 1.3
Home Back to DSOs