Starship Asterisk*

Portrait of NGC 281

Explanation: Look through the cosmic cloud cataloged as NGC 281 and you might miss the stars of open cluster IC 1590. Still, formed within the nebula that cluster's young, massive stars ultimately power the pervasive nebular glow. The eye-catching shapes looming in this portrait of NGC 281 are sculpted dusty columns and dense Bok globules seen in silhouette, eroded by intense, energetic winds and radiation from the hot cluster stars. If they survive long enough, the dusty structures could also be sites of future star formation. Playfully called the Pacman Nebula because of its overall shape, NGC 281 is about 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. This sharp composite image was made through narrow-band filters. It combines emission from the nebula's hydrogen and oxygen atoms to synthesize red, green, and blue colors. The scene spans well over 80 light-years at the estimated distance of NGC 281.

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APOD Robot wrote:
Look through the cosmic cloud cataloged as NGC 281 and you might miss the stars of open cluster IC 1590.

Yes, I think that narrowband Hubble palette images tend to "play down" the stars that ionize the nebulas in the first place and make the stars harder to see. So I guess it's up to me to post a nice RGB image of NGC 281! I find the colors lovely in the picture on the left. But the picture at right does an even better job at bringing out the stars. Note the dense clump of very hot stars in the center, and the scattered, somewhat less bright stars surrounding it.

Ann

Awesome view....

thanks to Ann for the comparison...

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Ann wrote: ↑Thu Nov 22, 2018 5:50 am

APOD Robot wrote:
Look through the cosmic cloud cataloged as NGC 281 and you might miss the stars of open cluster IC 1590.

Yes, I think that narrowband Hubble palette images tend to "play down" the stars that ionize the nebulas in the first place and make the stars harder to see.

Narrowband images increase the contrast of dim emission sources in comparison with broadband sources like stars. It doesn't matter what filters those are, or what palette is used for display. This image isn't using the typical Hubble palette at all, as it has only two source channels, not three.

Stunning and wonderful as always.

However, sentence three reads:
The eye-catching shapes looming in this portrait of NGC 281 are sculpted dusty columns and dense Bok globules seen in silhouette, eroded by intense, energetic winds and radiation from the hot cluster stars.

It might read easier if you replace "are sculpted" with "include."

Today's image is a treasure trunk turning out the jewels within!

Beautiful image
Very interesting