NGC1579

NGC1579 Nebula in Perseus

This is one of those odd nebula that doesn't get photograhed very often. It's not terribly photogenic that's for sure. It is quite large however. It measures about 12 arc minutes across as near as I can tell. Film images show most of this object as being red. There is a bit of nebulosity surrounding the bright star on the left of the nebula which shows blue in photographs.

C14, ST7, F4, 45 min luminance, 10 min RGB

The NGC catalog describes this as a "reflection nebula" or one whose light is reflected from stars. The large amount of red color shown in film and CCD images leads me to believe that most of the nebula's emissions are from ionized gasses.

So what's with the weird colors in this image? I wanted to bring out as much detail as I could with the color information that I had. The data collected was altered in the digital darkroom to obtains these subtle shades of yellows and browns.