Ani Shastry aka Starman

Bernes 142 is a dark cloud at the heart of Chamaeleon I, one of the Sun’s nearest stellar nurseries at roughly 600 light years. Bernes’ 1977 catalogue surveyed bright nebulae buried in opaque dust. This field holds three, each a lantern lit by a star that has only just begun to shine. From Chile, this southern cloud circles the celestial pole without setting.

Right of center and a little below, Cederblad 111, an electric blue reflection nebula, wraps around HD 97048, a young Herbig Ae/Be star still carrying its birth disk. Dust streams past in fine combed filaments, like smoke caught in a beam of light. Upper left, Cederblad 110 answers in warm amber, a reflection nebula split by a dark lane and hollowed into a C shape. Hidden within is Ced 110 IRS 4, a protostellar binary so deeply embedded that only infrared telescopes can see it. Its light has let the James Webb Space Telescope probe the ices frozen onto the cloud’s grains.

Below and right of the blue, the Chamaeleon Infrared Nebula opens as a small orange fan: a bipolar reflection nebula carved by jets from a newborn low mass star tunneling out of the cloud. Faint crimson knots between the nebulae are shocked gas where other outflows strike the cloud.

What holds me in this image is how much of it is dark. The nebulae are small islands in a molecular cloud folding over itself in brown and ochre layers thick enough to swallow the background stars. Seventeen hours of exposure went into that darkness, chasing the cloud’s faint texture until the shadows themselves became the subject.

Captured from my remote setup at Obstech in Chile:
🔭 PlaneWave CDK500 Observatory System
📸 Moravian C5A-100M Camera
🎨 Chroma L, R, G, B Filters
📀 L: 68×300s, R: 80×180s, G: 78×180s, B: 74×180s (17.27 hours)
🖥️ Processed in PixInsight and Adobe Photoshop

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