The Running Chicken NebulaAnna KehAward: Top 100
School: high school for math, science, and engineering The Running Chicken Nebula, or IC 2944, is an emission nebula in the constellation Centaurus known for being a star-forming region and loosely resembling a bird. The nebula also contains Thackeray's Globules, a region of Bok globules or thick clouds of dust that are so dense they are opaque; however, they are not prominent in this image. I used the Amateur Astronomers Association's Astro-Physics 130mm Gran Tourismo with an 860mm focal length and a QHY600. The telescope is located at a dark-sky site in Chile. The photo was taken with narrowband filters, which collect a very specific range of wavelengths associated with the emissions of Hα, O-III, and S-II. This method is ideal for photographing emission nebulae because it filters out light pollution and atmospheric glow, targeting the specific emissions from the excited states of certain ions. Because this nebula was much larger than my field of view, I needed to take photos in four separate locations and stitch them together. For each panel, I took ten 5-minute exposures for my three narrowband filters, which comes out to 120 total images across three nights. I calibrated, stacked, and processed my image in Siril to reduce any unwanted noise and maximize the signal-to-noise ratio. I used the Hubble or SHO palette, where the monochrome data is mapped to certain color channels; in this case, SII is red, Hα is green, and OIII is blue. The result is a striking image that can be appreciated with the naked eye. 
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