Horsehead Nebula, IC 434,Composite,4

The Horsehead Nebula is located 1500 light years away in the Orion constellation. It is one of the most iconic features in our Milky Way and is widely photographed. It is a reflection nebula made up of obscuring gas in the shape of a horse’s head back illuminated by the red light emission from Hydrogen gas. This composite zooms in on the Horsehead nebula itself along with the reflection nebula NGC 2023 to the left and below. Most of this image was done with the CDK17 at 2975mm in true color LRGB. This provides more detail for the Horsehead than comes through with narrowband filters as this portion of the image is a reflection nebula and not an emission nebula as is the case for the outer areas. The outer portion of the nebula which is an emission nebula was done with the FS152,f8 at 1200mm using narrowband Hydrogen Ha and Sulfur Sii filters with Ha in red and Sii in blue. The image scale was set by the CDK17 image and the FS152 images were scaled up to match. The overall processing of the final images was done in Photoshop CC20.