Description

IC410, located 12,000 lightyears from Earth in the constellation of Auriga (the Charioteer), is named the "Tadpole Nebula" for its distinctive tadpole-shaped clouds, each of which is around 10 lightyears long. It is a dusty emission nebula and part of a larger star forming region containing the Flaming Star Nebula. This dusty gaseous region is illuminated and sculpted by the radiation pressure from the open star cluster of NGC1893, a comparatively young cluster at only around 4 million years old, and is a site of ongoing star formation. This image was my first autoguided nebula image, really showing the power of precision tracking when compared with some of my earlier attempts at nebulae. This image consists of around 2 hrs total exposure time using a Canon EOS 550D (unmodified) with a Skywatcher 200p-DS 8" Newtonian telescope on an autoguided HEQ5 mount.