Dragons of Ara, NGC 6188

Dragons of Ara NGC 6188 This image shows dark and light shapes of fighting dragons winging their way through dusty clouds of light emitting gas and dust.  The emission nebula is found near the edge of an otherwise dark and large molecular cloud in the southern, constellation Ara, about 4,000 light-years away. Born in that region only a few million years ago, the massive young stars of the embedded Ara OB1 sculpt the fantastic shapes and power the nebular glow with stellar winds and intense ultraviolet radiation. The recent star formation itself was likely triggered by winds and supernova explosions, from previous generations of massive stars, that swept up and compressed the molecular gas. The image is a composite of two images. The upper portion showing the tops of the dragons heads was taken in Rio Hurtado Chile and the lower part is from a copyrighted 10 hour image taken by Ariel Cappelletti in Cordoba Argentina and used with his permission.  The field of view spans about four full Moons, corresponding to about 150 light years at the estimated distance of NGC 6188. The dramatic false color image  in the Hubble palette highlights the emission of hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen gases , energized by intense ultraviolet radiation from the nearby stars, to the glow of the nebula. Green in the image come from Hydrogen gas emission, red come from Sulfur  and blue comes from Oxygen.   The upper part of the image consists of 42 atomic filter images taken over a total of 21 hours. The image was done by making a synthetic luminance from the narrowband images and then blending in the color from each using the color blending mode in Photoshop CC2020 and then merging the two images to create the final image.