NGC 3324, Gabriela Mistral Nebula

Gabriela, NGC  3324  This bright nebular cloud was sculpted by stellar winds and radiation from the hot young stars of open cluster NGC 3324. With dust clouds in silhouette against its glowing atomic gas, the pocket shaped star-forming region actually spans about 35 light-years. It lies some 7,500 light-years away toward the nebula rich southern constellation Carina. A composite of narrowband image data, the telescopic view captures the characteristic emission from ionized sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms mapped to red, green and blue hues of the popular Hubble Palette. For some, the celestial landscape of bright ridges of emission bordered by cool, obscuring dust  create a recognizable face in profile. The region’s popular name is the Gabriala Mistral Nebula for the Nobel Prize winning Chilean poet. The processing was done by first eliminating the stars and creating a synthetic luminance by blending the light from the Ha, Sii, and Oiii filters. The color was then added and the final step was to add the stars back by blending in a combination of the stars from the Ha image together with the RGB image.