Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Scorpius (Sco)  ·  Contains:  NGC 6357
NGC 6357 - Lobster Nebula, starlord
NGC 6357 - Lobster Nebula
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NGC 6357 - Lobster Nebula

NGC 6357 - Lobster Nebula, starlord
NGC 6357 - Lobster Nebula
Powered byPixInsight

NGC 6357 - Lobster Nebula

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Description

Description

A Hubble Palette image of the Lobster Nebula (or War and Peace Nebula). It is located around 5500 light years away.

The image was taken from the city state of Singapore, a white zone area. Generally poor seeing coupled with high levels of light pollution, ambient temperature, and humidity make imaging very challenging.

This diffuse nebula contains many proto-stars, including many hot, luminous, massive stars, placing it among the most prominent sites of massive-star formation in our neighborhood of the galaxy. X-ray observations from Chandra reveal hundreds of point sources (these young stars) within NGC 6357 that would otherwise be shrouded in the gas and dust.

There are at least 3 clusters of young stars in the nebula. You can make out an open cluster, Pismis 24, near the core of the nebula. It includes some of the most luminous and massive stars known.

You can also see at least one young star breaking out and illuminating a cocoon (slightly to the right of Pismis 24 in the image).

PixInsight Processing

Being my first narrowband color image, I am including some information on the processing. Comments welcome. Maybe I'll come back to it one day to see how much I might have progressed!

Narrowband channels processed as follows:

- Integration

- Registration

- Dynamic Background Extraction

- Median Wavelet Transformation

- Masked Stretch

- ACDNR

- Histogram Transformation

Synthetic luminance channel was extract after DBE of individual channels. Processed with:

- Deconvolution

- Dynamic Background Extraction

- Masked Stretch

- Curves Transformation

- TGV

The images were combined using the AIP-SHO script. Thereafter:

- Color Saturation with Color Mask (to remove magenta halos)

- Local Histogram Equalization

- Color Saturation and Curves Transformation tweaks

Comments

Revisions

  • NGC 6357 - Lobster Nebula, starlord
    Original
  • NGC 6357 - Lobster Nebula, starlord
    C
  • Final
    NGC 6357 - Lobster Nebula, starlord
    G

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

NGC 6357 - Lobster Nebula, starlord