Fighting Dragons of Ara / Rim Nebula (NGC 6188)

Overview

After a year of not leveraging my Telescope Live account, I decided it would be worth spending some time revisiting the service and seeing what upgrades they’ve managed in the new 3.0 instance. Much to my surprise they have now “batch” collected a number of their datasets for specific targets giving users the opportunity to download and work from. 

NGC 6188 is a target in the Southern Hemisphere that I’ve wanted to capture for a long while and luckily, thanks to Telescope Live’s bundled data sets I was able to grab 18 hrs of narrowband data to play with. This target is often called the Fighting Dragons of Ara or the Rim Nebula and is located in the constellation of Ara. It is an emission nebula that gets its name from its slight resemblance to fighting dragons. This target also contains the open cluster NGC 6193. Much of the structures of the gas clouds are created by the young stars and the radiation they emit. 

Learn more:

https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/astrophotography/nebulae/ngc-6188/

This data comes from the AUS-2 telescope located at the Heaven’s Mirror Observatory in Australia.