Locomotoring

Heart nebula is in our Milky Way galaxy. More specifically, it is in the Perseus arm of our galaxy. It is close to the constellation of Cassiopeia. This is taken from our courtyard in mid Jan, Jan 12th and 13th of 2026. Cassiopeia is close to north pole, so chances are, the heart will stay accessible for significant part of the year.

It is winter and darkness approaches early. It is feasible to get started with polar alignment by 7 pm. And assuming no significant hurdles wrangling the stars, it is possible to get 90 minutes of shooting time on this target before we hit a literal wall – the roof gutter start popping up in the frame. This one is our first target that is shot across two different days.

Heart is often photographed with its partner, the soul nebula. In this image, the soul nebula is trying to creep in from right side of the image. The focal length of our telescope doesn’t allow for both to be captured in a single frame.

I want to say that post-processing the raw images has minimal tweaks. But any processing here is subjective since human eye doesn’t see the nebula. My eyes can barely sees the stars from our courtyard. A single frame here collects light across 60 seconds on the camera sensor. While the sensor captures thousands of stars easily, the nebula is still hard to see in a minute. In post-processing, we add the photons across 120 frames, in this case, totalling 120 minutes and only then the faint structure of the nebula emerges. In post-processing, I do reduce the number of stars otherwise it gets hard to see the nebula.

Hubble has imaged the heart nebula and the heart of the heart nebula, the later is referred to as Melotte 15. In Hubble images, Melotte 15 appears in the sea of vibrant blues. Hubble images are composite of narrowband and broadband images, the view spans about 15 light-years (images taken over 15 years) and includes emission from ionized hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen atoms that get mapped to green, red, and blue hues.

Heart is only 7500 light years away. Humanity was thriving 7500 years ago. Scientific evidence suggests we were growing rice (Asia), making cheese (Europe), burning forests to clear land (Malta), collecting shellfish at industrial scale (California), engaging in complex mortuary practices (Africa), …