2019 July 31
IC 1795: The Fishhead Nebula
Image Credit & Copyright:
Alan Pham
Explanation:
To some, this nebula looks like the head of a fish.
However, this colorful cosmic portrait really features
glowing gas
and obscuring dust clouds in IC 1795,
a star forming region in the northern
constellation Cassiopeia.
The nebula's colors were created by adopting the
Hubble color palette
for mapping narrow emission from oxygen, hydrogen,
and sulfur atoms to blue, green and red colors, and further
blending the data with images of the region recorded through
broadband filters.
Not far on the sky from the famous Double Star
Cluster in Perseus, IC 1795 is itself located next to IC 1805,
the Heart Nebula, as part of a
complex
of star forming regions that lie
at the edge of a large molecular cloud.
Located just over 6,000
light-years away, the larger
star forming complex sprawls along the Perseus spiral arm of
our Milky Way Galaxy.
At that distance, this picture would span about 70 light-years
across IC 1795.