The Carina Nebula (NGC 3372)

In the Fall of 2020 I decided to join as a member of Telescope Live a telescope-as-a-service offering that allows you to schedule time on their various locations across the world from Spain to Chile to Australia with a wide variety of different telescopes to get time on. Specifically, I’ve been interested in focusing on targets in the Souther Hemisphere that I can’t image from my location.

The Carina Nebula (NGC 3372) located in the constellation of the same name is roughly ~8,500 ly from us and is the largest diffuse nebula in our sky. It’s about 4x the size of the Orion Nebula in the North. While the nebula itself is quite large there are many striking structures that can be found within it including the potentially, soon-to-go-supernova star Eta Carina itself.

Since TL gives you the opportunity to schedule time using different equipment there are two versions of this target. The one above is a narrowband SHO version using a smaller, wide-field 106mm telescope from Australia, and the below an HaRGB version using a 24 in Planewave CDK located in the Atacama desert in Chile.

Learn More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carina_Nebula