Astrophysical data on the Flaming Star Nebula is easy to find online. Click here for the NASA overview. After a couple of quick and dirty processing attempts that yielded a drab image, it suddently occurred to me that the goal for my processing should be "flame-like."The star AE Auriga is powering the "flame," so to speak. There's an interesting astrophysical history here, since "AE Aurigae's story is inextricably linked to another star called Mu Columbae. Around 2.7 million years ago these two stars were formed and had a close encounter with one another in the Great Orion Nebula. The encounter was so close (another star was certainly involved) that each of them was ejected from the Orion complex never to return again. Currently these stars are 66 degrees away from one another in the sky. Astronomer's discovered these two runaway stars by measuring their apparent (fast) motion and noting that if you work backwards in time - the origin is in the same place at the same time! But AE Auriga is certainly the more glamorous of the two stars since it just happens to be moving through a region of gas that makes it look like a 'Flaming Star.' " Source
Acquisition and Processing
SV115 at f/5.6 on the CGE, SBIG ST2000XCM, 22 subs at 3 minutes, acquired using CCDSOFT v.5, processed in ImagesPlus 3, beta9 and PhotoShop CS2.
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