The Red Horror

Out of the red mist, a great cosmic horror, jaws wide open, reaches out to a hapless galaxy to devour!

Reminiscent of the giant sand worms from the fictional novel "Dune", the cometary globual CG4 located in the constellation Puppis is in fact over a 100 million light-years closer than the distant galaxy ESO 257-19 that appears in this image to be in deadly peril. CG4 itself is about 8 light-years long and situated roughly 1,300 light years from Earth.

The field of view I wanted for this image was quite small, too small for my Esprit 120ed which has an 840mm focal length and my favourite ASI2600MC camera (without severe cropping). So, instead I used an ASI585MC camera as it gives me some added "magnification" through smaller pixel and sensor size, but at the cost of less total pixels overall. Then, 23 hours of narrowband and almost 11 hours of RGB integration time later (ha, as if that's all there is to it) - I present this combined Ha / RGB image of CG4.

UPDATE: this image won a NASA APOD

| Started 2026-01-19 | Perth and Julimar, Western Australia | ASI585MC | Skywatcher Esprit 120ed | Skywatcher NEQ6 mount | AsiAir Plus | 1 x panel | Gain 252 | 23hrs Antila HaOIII Filter | 10hrs50min Skyglow Filter |