NGC 6188, Dragons of Ara and Surroundings Cropped

Dragons of Ara and surroundings,  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 reddish Ara OB1 star cluster(just left and above the image center)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 six images. The overall image was captured with a Takahashi FSQ106 but detail was enhanced with two images from an Astro Physics RH305 and three images from the 17″ Planewave CDK17. The scale of the image is close to the scale of the CDK17 and gives the center of the image great detail. The image size is over 11,062 x 8850 pixels or about 97 mega pixels. The field of view spans about 4 full Moons, corresponding to about 130 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. Green in the image comes from Hydrogen gas emission, red from Sulfur  and blue from Oxygen. Each of the separate images were done by making a synthetic luminance from the narrowband images from each camera and then blending in the color in Photoshop CC2021.  The images from the smaller FSQ106 and RH305 telescopes were then scaled to that of the CDK17 and  then the six images were merged to create the final detailed image.