NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day award!

Hi folks, I still can’t believe I got an Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) Award for my PacMan Nebula! I wanted to celebrate this personal milestone on my website by sharing more info about the picture, as well as the story behind creating the picture. To me, it demonstrates that after years of gradually improving my skills, I’m finally able to produce decent quality space pictures if I really put my mind to it. I also had a bit of luck. The weather conditions were extremely good during two full days in October, and after putting in some hard labour, the starless picture turned out extremely well. An additional complexity was that I took the pictures under severely light polluted skies. Thank you for sticking with me over the past years! I hope to continue my hobby for many more years to come!

About the picture:

In visible light, I removed the stars from my narrow-band image of NGC 281, a star forming region some 10,000 light-years away toward the constellation Cassiopeia. Using the Starless image, I digitally added back some stars, but instead of using stars in the visible light, I added stars using X-ray data (in purple) from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and infrared data (in red) from the Spitzer Space Telescope. The merged multiwavelength view reveals a multitude of stars in the region’s embedded star cluster IC 1590. The young stars are normally hidden in visible light images by the natal cloud’s gas and obscuring dust. Also known to backyard astro-imagers as the Pacman Nebula for its overall appearance in visible light, NGC 281 is about 80 light-years across.

 I captured the visible light from my backyard with my Celestron Edge HD 8″ telescope at F/7 with the reducer, and my ZWO ASI 1600MM pro camera with 7nm Ha, Sii, Oiii filters. You can check out the astrophotography gear I use here.
⁠
Image details:⁠
Ha 30x300s⁠
Sii 30x300s⁠
Oiii 30x300s⁠
⁠
I created a hubble palette (sho) picture and used starnet++ to eliminate all stars in the visible light spectrum. After that, I added infrared data (in red) from Spitzer and X-ray data (in purple) from Chandra – professional space telescopes – to reveal star formation regions (e.g., IC1590) within the molecular clouds of the PacMan Nebula. This nebula is a bright emission nebula in the northern constellation of Cassiopeia and is part of the Milky Way’s Perseus Spiral Arm. ⁠It harbors many newborn stars and is a popular place for professional astronomers to study star formation processes. ⁠

I’ve made a short video about how I’ve created the picture here:

I’ve made a short video where I reflect on the process of creating the picture and getting an APOD here:

I hope this picture inspires others who live under light polluted skies like me to get into this wonderful hobby of astrophotography. With nowaydays technological advances, you’ll be surprised at the deep space images you can take from your backyard.

Clear skies!