The Soul Nebula

This beautiful and vibrant nebula was painstakingly captured throughout the cold November and December months of 2023. Explore its beauty with this high quality print that can be hung up in the home or office!

The Soul Nebula is an active star forming region. The nebula gets it shape from radiation and winds from actively forming stars pushing clouds of hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen gas away, causing them to clump together which also kicks off the formation of even more stars. Even in terms of the nebulae I typically shoot, the Soul Nebula is huge - stretching 150 light years across.

There is an open cluster of stars towards the center of the nebula, known as IC1848 - these stars are INCREDIBLY young in terms of the lifespan of stars, having only formed about a million years ago. The pillars of gasses that you see throughout the edge of the nebula that gives it its shape have stars forming at their tips!

This is by far the best image I've produced from a technical standpoint. From careful gathering of exposures to incorporating new techniques into my processing, this is my cleanest image ever. This image incorporates the SHO palette for the nebula, meaning I used filters that only captured the wavelengths of light emitted by sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen and assigned those to red, green, and blue respectively. I also incorporated red, green, and blue filters just for the stars.

Please note this image is heavily compressed for the website. You can view the full resolution JPEG file here: https://www.astrobin.com/00mmag/