30/05/2026
May 2026 vs May 2025 🙏🏽 I can still remember how excited I was to take and edit that first 90 minute photo of the Carina Nebula last year. I suspect I'll grow into a grumpy old man chasing after the goats and complaining about light pollution 😂 remember to look up at the stars while you still can!
This is my latest project. 16 hours on the Carina Nebula. Captured over 4 nights this May. It is one of the easier deep space objects to shoot as it's so big and bright. And for those of us in the Southern hemisphere it's visible all year round.
Think of it as one of the biggest, brightest nurseries for stars in our galaxy. Located about 7,500 light-years away in the constellation Carina, it's a vast cloud of gas and dust where new stars are being born. What makes it special? It's home to Eta Carinae, one of the biggest and most unstable stars we know —nearly 100 times the sun's mass.
Visually, it's stunning. The intense radiation from its young, massive stars carves out cavities and makes the surrounding hydrogen gas glow red. Meanwhile, dark, thick dust lanes block visible light, creating a dramatic, three-dimensional look.
Not that anyone will still be reading here but... The Carina Nebula, like most nebulae in the universe, is primarily made of hydrogen (roughly 90%) and helium (about 10%). The remaining tiny fraction (less than 1%) is a mix of heavier elements — often called "metals" in astronomy — including:
· Oxygen (O, OII, OIII)
· Sulfur (SII)
· Carbon (C)
· Nitrogen (N)
· Neon (Ne)
· Argon (Ar)
It’s this small amount of heavier gases — particularly, oxygen and sulfur — that produces the nebula’s vivid colors when energized by hot, young stars. Hydrogen glows red (H-alpha), oxygen blue/green (OIII), and sulfur deep red (SII).
Stacked & edited in Pixinsight using Narrowband Normalisation in the HOO palette to bring out the different colours available from the data.
📸 Seestar s30 pro
📍 Botswana, bortle 4.5
⏱️ 16hrs; 1931 frames x 30sec
💾 Pixinsight
