ρ Ophiuchi

Main page▹Observations	19.7.2018 \|

ρ Ophiuchi

Surroundings of the star ρ Ophiuchi is really photogenic. Only rarely offers any area on the sky such rich set of colors, despite these colors can be acquired only on photograph, they are too dim for human eye to recognize. What’s more, yellow hue is really unusual on the sky (do not be confused by narrow-band images, which are false-colored and thus often full of yellow nebulosity, we are talking about true colors now).

Because the nebula complex is angularly big, it is often imaged using relatively short-focus photographic lens instead of astronomical telescope. But the CielAustral group of astrophotographers (Jean Claude Canonne, Nicolas Outters, Philippe Bernhard, Didier Chaplain, Laurent Bourgon) used TEC 160 telescope with 112 cm focal length. It was necessary to stitch 9 images, each captured by large-format G4-16000 camera, to cover the whole area.

The resulting image has fantastic resolution almost 12000 by 12000 pixels (click the image for full-resolution variant). Also notice the globular cluster M4 close to the upper-left corner and the much smaller NGC6144 globular cluster, somewhat closer to the image center. Total exposure time exceeded 67 hours.