Statue of Liberty, NB & RGB, NGC 3576

The Statue of Liberty, NGC 3576  NGC 3576  is about 100 light-years across and 9,000 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina, not far on the sky from the famous Eta Carina Nebula located 60 degrees below the equator in the sky. What’s happening in the Statue of Liberty nebula? Bright stars and interesting molecules are forming and being liberated. This image showcases dense knots of dark interstellar dust, bright stars that have formed in the past few million years, fields of glowing Hydrogen gas ionized by these stars, and great loops of gas expelled by dying stars. A detailed study of NGC 3576 uncovered at least 33 massive stars in the end stages of formation, and the clear presence of the complex carbon molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). PAHs are thought to be created in the cooling gas of star forming regions, and their development in the Sun’s formation nebula five billion years ago may have been an important step in the development of life on Earth. This image is a combination of a false color image  and an RGB image. This image differs from the companion image which is totally false color in the Hubble palette. Red in the image is from Hydrogen emission, green in the image come from Sulfur, and blue comes from Oxygen.  The image was taken in Rio Hurtado, Chile.  It consists of 60 atomic filter images taken over a total of 30 hours and 24 RGB images taken over 6 hours. The image was done by first making a synthetic luminance from the narrowband images and then blending in the color from each using the color blending mode in Photoshop CC2020. The stars in the RGB image were removed using Starnet++ and then blended in using the “lighten” blending mode in Photoshop. The effect of the RGB image was to bring out more detail in the Statue of Liberty portion which lost detail in the Hydrogen red version of the narrowband image.