I don’t really think that words can effectively describe this image. There’s so much going on here that it almost seems wrong to try to simplify what’s happening, but here goes: At the top center lies a massive star cluster that’s putting out enormous amounts of energy. All the hydrogen gas around that star cluster is being ionized, much like a neon sign. The ionization and energy outflows create the beautiful knots and filaments that you can see. By looking at this region through a filter that isolates the Balmer alpha drop, we can see the nebula in all its glory.
About 2 months ago, I noticed that there were a huge amount of Hubble observations in the 30 dor region, so I decided to mosaic them together. It turned out to be a much harder and intensive project than I originally thought, but the I think the end result was worth it (325 megapixels!). To solve for interpolation, mosaicking artifacts, and the like, I used mosaic by coordinates to form a reference, then used star alignment to actually create the image. The resulting image was nearly 2 gigabytes!
Below, in the “closeups” section, you can see my four favorite regions of detail.
I strongly recommend looking at the full size gigapan here: http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/228522. There, you can zoom and pan on the full size image, and see all those details for yourself.
Image:
Closeups:
A small region near the cluster. Through the center, wild crisscrossing filaments of H-alpha dominate.. On the bottom left, there are two tiny little globules of dust.
A “shelf” of gas over a sea of dark dust.
A bit of peace in all the chaos – just a hill of H-alpha gas.
Some fine filaments of H-alpha overlaid on a marble-like surface of ionized hydrogen and inert dark gas.
Details:
This work is based on observations taken by the Hubble Tarantula Treasury Project with the NASA/ESA HST, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555.
Read more about this project here: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013AJ….146…53S/abstract, https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016ApJS..222…11S/abstract
Processing:
- Mosaic by coordinates
- Star alignement
- Image integration
- Drizzle integration
- Photometric mosiac
- Crop out stacking artifacts
- Deconvolution
- Histogram stretch
- HDR multiscale transform
- MMT sharpening
- Curves transformation
- Exponential transform