This one image frames examples of both the beginning and end points of a star’s life.

I shot this last night, February 6, 2013, capturing a field in the constellation of Gemini the twins. At upper right is the showpiece star cluster known as Messier 35. It’s a collection of fairly young stars still hanging around together after forming from a cloud of interstellar gas tens of millions of years ago. M35 lies about 2,800 light years from Earth, on the other side of the spiral arm we live in. Just below M35 you can see another smaller and denser cluster. That’s NGC 2158, about five times farther away from us, thus its smaller apparent size. Both are objects that represent the early stages of a star’s life.

At lower left is an object known as the Jellyfish Nebula, for obvious reasons. The official name is IC 443. It’s the expanding remains of a star that blew up as a supernova anywhere from 3,000 to 30,000 years ago. What’s left of the star’s core can still be detected as a spinning neutron star. You need a radio telescope to see that object, but the blasted remains of the star’s outer layers can be seen through a large backyard telescope as a shell of gas. It is expanding into the space between stars – the interstellar medium – ploughing into other gas clouds. The shockwave from its collision with other nebulas may trigger those clouds to collapse and form clusters of new stars. And so it goes in the Galaxy.

For this portrait of stellar lifestyles, I used a 92mm apochromatic refractor and a new Canon 6D camera, one that has had its sensor filter modified to accept a greater range of deep red light emitted by hydrogen nebulas. The image is actually a stack of 12 exposures with an accumulated exposure time of 80 minutes.

– Alan, February 7, 2013 / © 2013 Alan Dyer