Tarantula Nebula
The Tarantula is a giant stellar nursery in the midst of
transforming a massive reservoir of mostly hydrogen gas into hundreds of
thousands of stars lying 161,000 light years from Earth in the Large Magellanic
Cloud.
The large star cluster Radcliffe 136 (R136) lies at the
heart nebula. Astronomers, at one time, thought that this intensely bright
central region held a single supermassive star. They thought that such a supermassive
star would tip the scales at approximately 1,000 solar masses. This created a
quandary since laws of physics dictate that no such star could exist.
But with the advent of the Hubble Space Telescope, and new
high-resolution imaging techniques, R136’s true nature came into focus. R136 is
a compact star cluster comprising dozens of O-type main-sequence stars — the
hottest, brightest, and most massive stars that are still converting hydrogen
into helium in their cores — and equally hot and massive Wolf-Rayet stars, are
characterized by ferocious stellar winds. No other spot in the known universe
contains as many of these types of stars in such a relativity small volume of space.
The most extreme of these young stars likely started their lives with 200 to
300 solar masses, but they have already slimmed down by 10 to 20 percent in the
last million years or so because they shed weight at an amazing rate.” The 10
brightest of these stars provide nearly 30 percent of the energy ionizing all
of Tarantula’s gas.
Astronomers are particularly interested in the Tarantula Nebule because it appears to be chemically very similar in composition to the large star-forming regions observed when star formation was at its peak, and the Universe was only a few billion years old. Star-forming regions in our galaxy, The Milky Way, are not producing stars at nearly the same rate as the Tarantula Nebula, and they have a different chemical composition.
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Total integration time 5400s (1.5h): Red 2 X 600s, Blue 3 X 600s, Green 2 X 600s,
Luminance 2 X 600s .
The data I used to create this image, was acquired via
Telescope Live’s network of robotic telescopes.
Telescope Specification - CHI-1
- Planewave CDK24 telescope with Corrected Dall Kirkham optical design.
- Model: Planewave CDK24
- Aperture: 610 mm (24 inches)
- Focal Length: 3962 mm
- F-ratio: 6.5
- Mount: Mathis MI-1000/1250 with absolute encoders
- Model: FLI PL 9000
- Pixel Size: 12 Nanometers
- Pixel Array: 3056 x 3056
- Pixel Resolution: 0.62 arcsec/pixel
- Cooling: -25 degrees in Summer, -30 degrees in Winter
- Field of View: 31.8 x 31.8 arcmin
- Available Filters: Astrodon Luminance, Red, Green, Blue, Halpha, SII, OIII, Sloan r, Sloan g, Sloan i
- Position angle: 359.36 degrees
Observatory
- Location: Río Hurtado, Coquimbo Region, Chile
- Coordinates: 30.472529° S, 70.762999° W (Google maps)
- Elevation: 1525 m
- Average seeing: 1'' - 1.5''
- MPC code: X0
- Siril 1.2.0
- Photoshop 25.0.0
- Lightroom Classic
- Starnet++
- Astro Sharp
- Graf X pert
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