Lagoon Cocoon (2014)

Followed through with this one and I am sure glad I did. The left side had a good deal of cosmic rays to clean off but it was worth it.

I couldn’t help with the alliteration in the title. The dark molecular clouds are fleeting structures surrounding the young stars which are pushing and pushing away at it. Eventually it will diffuse into the interstellar medium and the stars will have cleared away their dusty cocoon.

A lot got cropped off in order to fit the data into a nice rectangle. An uncropped PNG version is available here.

Filters did not neatly fall into color channels due to the usual complexities. Two WFPC2 datasets were used. One was from 1995 and the other from 2009.

This image is comprised of broadband infrared (f814w), narrowband H-alpha (f656n) and H-beta (f487n), and Strömgren y (f547m) data.

Red+Blue: f814w
Red+Green: f656n
Green+Red: f547m
Blue+Green: f487n

North is NOT up. It is 36.5° counter-clockwise from up.

Copyright information:
Hubble data is public domain, but I put a lot of work into combining it into beautiful color images. The minimal credit line should read: NASA / ESA / J. Schmidt

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.