ETA CARINAE

Eta Carinae is one of the largest and most energetic emission nebulae visible from Earth. This image was shot through an unmodified camera with no filters so the colors are as your eye would see them if you could integrate for hours. This is a very tricky target to acquire from anywhere North of the equator as it is usually exclusively a Southern target. However, from Maunakea it gets about 10 degrees above the horizon. With the exceptionally clear skies up at almost 14,000ft low elevation targets are no problem!

Every filament, cavity, and glowing cloud shown here is built from hours of collected photons and carefully processed astronomical data.

At the heart of the Carina Nebula lies the unstable giant star Eta Carinae, whose violent history has sculpted the surrounding clouds of gas and dust. During its famous 19th-century Great Eruption, the star expelled an enormous amount of material, creating the bipolar Homunculus Nebula that now surrounds it.

Intense ultraviolet radiation and powerful stellar winds from Eta Carinae and neighboring massive stars ionize the surrounding hydrogen and oxygen, causing the nebula to glow in the vivid reds, cyans, and magentas revealed through long-exposure astrophotography.

Remarkably, the Homunculus Nebula is also home to the only known naturally occurring ultraviolet laser ever discovered. In its extreme environment, iron ions are stimulated by Eta Carinae's intense radiation field to produce coherent UV emission—a rare astrophysical phenomenon that makes this extraordinary stellar system one of the most fascinating laboratories in the known universe.