My first ever picture of IC 410 nebula also known as The Tadpoles Nebula. I was capturing this target over the course of 10 nights in December 2023.
IC 410 is an emission nebula located approximately 10,000 light years away in the constellation Auriga. At the center of the image there is an open star cluster NGC 1893 that is relatively young aging around 4 million years old. The cluster consists of blue hot type B and O stars that ionize gas of IC 410 and create the nebula around them.
There are two interesting structures that lie within the star cluster – the tadpoles. Those are small clouds of gas and dust and places of active star formation. The tadpoles are influenced by stellar winds and radiation from near stars. A few million years later these two structures should “dissolve” leaving young stars at their place.
The image above was captured using a dual narrowband filter that captures the light emitted by Ha and OIII. When capturing through a filter like this, the colors of stars are shifted from natural looking, so I added additional 4 hours of integration time captured in broadband to reveal the natural color of stars. The orangish colors represent the light emitted by Ha, and OII has blue shades of color on the image.
Gear I used to capture this image:
Telescope: SvBony SV550 122mm Triplet APO F/5.6
Camera: ZWO ASI2600MC Pro
Mount: Sky-Watcher EQ6-R Pro
Filters: SvBony SV220 7nm 2″ | Optolong UV/IR cut 2″
Guiding Telescope: Orion 50mm Mini Guide scope
Guiding Camera: SvBony SV305
Acquisition details:
- 49 x 300″ (4 hours 5 minutes captured with the UV/IR cut filter)
- 721 x 300″ (60 hours 5 minutes captured with the dual narrowband filter)
Processing: Astro Pixel Processor, PixInsight, and Adobe Photoshop.
The full resolution version of this image is available on my AstroBin page:
