Heart Nebula

The Heart Nebula, IC 1805 lies some 7500 light years away from Earth and is located in the Perseus Arm of the Galaxy in the constellation Cassiopeia. This is a fairly bright emission nebula showing glowing gas and darker dust lanes. The nebula is formed by plasma of ionized hydrogen and free electrons. The very brightest part of this nebula (the knot at the right) is separately classified as NGC 896,also on this website, because it was the first part of this nebula to be discovered. The nebula's powerful output and its configuration are driven by the radiation emanating from a small group of stars near the nebula's center. This open cluster of stars known as Melotte 15 contains a few bright stars nearly 50 times the mass of our Sun, and many more dim stars that are only a fraction of our Sun's mass. This was taken with a SBIG STL-11000 using an Astrodon Hydrogen Alpha Filter on a Takahashi FSQ-106ED Telescope. Exposure was 10 X 300 Sec unbinned images.