From Centaurus to Carina

On December 21, 2023, ESO publishes a press release about an image of the area popularly known as the Running Chicken Nebula. The image itself was obtained with the VST (Vista Survey Telescope) and it's OmegaCam wide-field camera, offering an unprecedented resolution of 1.5 billion pixels and a total field of view equivalent to an area of 25 full moons.

https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2320/

These types of professional observatory projects generate absolute admiration and, in one way or another, also inspiration to see what we can achieve with our equipment to, in some way, to complement the tremendous work done from professional observatories.

In this field of sky there is a huge amount of ionized hydrogen clouds along with a dozen open clusters that are a true delight to the eye. With the above in mind, we decided as the “Cluster One Observatory” team to obtain a deep field of that area in order to detect the weak clouds of ionized hydrogen that connect from the Centaurus to Carina, giving origin to the name of project.

The observations were obtained using an astronomical image acquisition system installed in the control center of the APEX observatory in San Pedro de Atacama, which has grade 2 on the Bortle scale. To obtain the data, a simple panel was defined using a Rokinon 135mm lens with the ASI294MC Pro sensor, which gives a field of 8.17 x 5.49 degrees. The data was adquired in a total of 15 observation sessions with 60 hours in total, distributed equally (30 hours) with LeX and UVIR filters.

Basically, it is a project of 60 hours of observation without counting the time for calibrations and data processing. Full acquisition and control of the acquisition system is a product of the renowned ZWO ASIAIR Plus unit.

As a final result, the image reveals the enormous population of HII zones and an impressive number of open star clusters. The NGC3532 zone deserves special mention, which is partially covered by the HII zones. It was, to say the least, a beautiful surprise when we noticed this peculiarity of the image.

All post-processing was made using Pixinsight and Adobe Photoshop software, where out typical workflow of merging the two images was applied to achieve the best signal-to-noise ratio possible with the most realistic and natural way of showing both the HII regions (captured in OSC narrowband) and dark molecular clouds (captured in OSC RGB).

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Last but not the least, this image is dedicated to our good and long time friend Rodrigo Parra, who inspired this optical project during an APEX BBQ, December 2023
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