Image of the day

Captured by
mikhail vasilenko

NGC4216 with supernova 2024gy

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vdB 14 and 15 image

vdB 14 and 15

Contains: Deep sky object
Acquisition Details
  • Number of frames:
  • FPS:
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  • CMI/CMII/CMIII:
Description

Sidney van den Bergh assembled his catalog of reflection nebulae in the 1960's. It contains 159 different reflection nebulae, and is a smorgasbord of challenging, but beautiful targets for astrophotographers. What are reflection nebulae, you ask? They are clouds of interstellar dust which would normally be dark (a dark nebula), but for the presence of a nearby star. The energy from nearby stars is insufficient to ionize the gas of the nebula to create an emission nebula (typically glowing red), but is enough to give sufficient scattering to make the dust visible as blue light. This image is a two-bagger. It shows vdB 14 on the left and vdB 15 on the right. They are about both about 2600 light-years from Earth. I collected about 18 hours of exposures using natural color LRGB filters, as well as narrowband hydrogen-alpha to tease out and enhance the red, ionized hydrogen in this region.