Messier 6 & Surrounding Area

HALPHA: 100 x 180 seconds
LUMINANCE: 40 x 180 seconds
RGB: 20 x 180 (each channel)
Total: 10 hours

Robert Burnham, Jr. describes this beautiful object as follows:
“Charming group whose arrangement suggests the outline of a butterfly with open wings.” Nothing better than a little "poetry" to describe such a prominent object.

In 1654 Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Hodierna was the first man to record this beautiful star cluster in the scorpion constellation.

In 1764 the French Charles Messier includes in his catalog as Messier 6. Under good conditions, it can be seen with the naked eye, in contrast to the dark regions surrounding the star cluster. It has an apparent magnitude of 4.2 and an estimated age of 100 million years, at a distance of approximately 1600 light years from planet Earth.

The brightest star in the cluster is BM SCORPII. It is cataloged as a yellow / orange supergiant, and is considered a semi-regular variable, as it is of the spectral class K0-K3, its magnitude varies from 5.5 to 7, in periods of 30 to 1100 days. The hot blue stars of the cluster belong to the spectral class B4 and B5.
The cluster to the right of this image is NGC 6404.

The most intense part of the image, which I had the idea from the outset to highlight, is part of an extensive emission nebula called: Sharpless 12.

The information about this object is very scarce, but I will try to put as much information as I can about this object. All ionization occurs due to the O-Star (O7V + O7V) HD 159176 binary star, which is located in cluster NGC 6383 and does not appear in my image.

A fact that caught my attention and that when we talk about astronomy we always go back to the past, most catalogs are hundreds of years old, but Sharpless is not even a century old. Stewart Lane Sharpless (born March 29, 1926 in Milwaukee, January 19, 2013) was an American astronomer who studied the structure of the Milky Way, professor emeritus of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester. The first edition of its catalog is from the year 1953 (SH1) contained 142 objects. The final version, published in 1959 (SH2), contains 312 objects.
Copyright: Maicon Germiniani