This is NGC 6729 and friends located in the constellation Corona Australis, a very relevant name in these times.

Corona is Latin for the word “crown”, so Corona Australis is also known as the southern crown. There is a northern counterpart called Corona Borealis. Corona Australis is one of the 48 constellations identified by Ptolemy, the second-century astronomer.

This particular nebula, discovered by Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt in 1861, is both a reflection and emission nebula, which means it not only reflects light, but also generates its own light as a result of star formation in the region. It is one of the closest star-forming regions to Earth at a distance of 424 light years, thereby situating it within our own Milky Way Galaxy.

The light in this region is being produced not just as a result of the radiation given off by the stars in the area, but also as a result of the friction caused by material moving at a very high-speed. It’s common in this area to see material in this region traveling at over one million kilometers per hour (or about 620,000 miles per hour)! The material is moving so fast that it causes shock waves when it collides with the surrounding gas. These shock waves cause the gas to glow and create the strangely colored glowing arcs and nebulous regions known as Herbig-Haro objects. These objects are only found in star-forming regions and are in this image, although the Hubble Space Telescope would be able to resolve them.

The Hubble Space Telescope caught its first glimpse of a Herbig-Haro object in 1993 when astronomers got their first and best glimpse at the time of what happens in a star forming region.

The objects in this image are NGC 6729, which is the bright white region just below the blue region near the center of the image, NGC 6727 which is the bright blue spot in the top left blue region, NGC 6726 which is right next to it, and IC 4812 which is the blue region near the right side of the image. There’s a darker region going through the center of the image and in between the blue objects – this is part of the nebula itself and is a dark region.

This image came out very well and there’s a lot of good color in it, from the blue of the nebula, to the dark region, to the surrounding red and white stars, making this a very interesting image to look at.

Acquisition and Processing Details

I booked several Slooh.com missions for this image; the total exposures were as follows:

  • Luminance 7 exposures at 50 sec, binned 2×2
  • Red: 4 exposures at 20 sec, binned 3×3
  • Green: 4 exposures at 20 sec, binned 3×3
  • Blue: 4 exposures at 20 sec, binned 3×3

I processed the image using PixInsight. I also used Photoshop to resize the image and add the logo; otherwise no additional processing was done in Photoshop.