RCW 113: a beautiful H II-region in Scorpius

Image Description and Details : RCW 113, also called Gum 55, is a huge emission nebula (H II-region) in the constellation Scorpius, located in the neighboring Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way. Its core ionising open cluster NGC 6231 is part of young, bluish stars known as the Scorpius OB1 association. This Sco OB1 association contains many star-forming areas with young, energetic stars of spectral class O & B. In this field of view other interesting deep sky objects are visible. The two bright stars to the left of NGC 6231 are zeta1 and zeta2 Scorpii. The Prawn Nebula (upper right, with blue hues), also known as IC 4628, is an emission nebula around 6,000 light-years from Earth. To the right of IC 4628 there is another open cluster NGC 6242. The Wolf or Fenrir Nebula (SL-17), @ 10 o’clock position in this image, is a dark nebula of dust and gas hiding the background stars. The Dark Tower (SFO 82) is the prominent bright-rimmed cometary globule, about 1.5 degrees away from NGC 6231 and Zeta Scorpii. The shape of this massive structure of cosmic dust resembles a dark tower emerging from the star field background. Most of these objects lie at a distance between 5,300-6,000 light-years from Earth. Image acquired with the Takahashi FSQ-106ED refractor and FLI PL16803 camera from Telescope Live in Heaven's Mirror Observatory, Australia. Total integration time: 300 minutes SHO: 10 sub-frames of 600s with each narrowband filter (SII, H-alpha and OIII). Dataset Telescope Live. Processing with Astro Pixel Processor, Photoshop CC with AstroPanel Pro, Astronomy Tools, Topaz Sharpen AI and NoiseXTerminator plug-ins.

Copyright: Jan Scheers