Soul Nebula – aka India Nebula

This nebula is a very large nebula as seen from Earth and my telescope, which images at 75 times magnification (or about the size of Moon) covers only a part of the soul nebula which is about 3 times as wide as Moon in our night sky.

So I took a small part of the Soul Nebula, because of a feature of this nebula that interested me. If you look closely, you can see, toward the center-bottom of this image, a shape that resembles the shape of the Indian subcontinent, including Sri Lanka, with extension to Middle East Asia toward it’s left and South-East Asia toward it’s right. I know – it’s only an imagination in my unnecessarily over-active brain, but I love seeing patterns in the night sky (or for that matter in the clouds) to more terrestrial and familiar objects.

This image highlights the portion that I think looks like India….

Soul Nebula is called so, because it is an irregularly shaped right next to another nebula that closely resembles heart! Here is a link to an image of both of these nebulae (not mine).
Soul Nebula is an emission nebula about 7500 light years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. Click here for an explanation on emission nebulae.

I took this image over 8.5 hours (21 images of 20 minutes each for Luminance and 9 images of 10 minutes for each color (RGB)).

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