Altar

"Altar" was created under the southern sky on a night that demanded patience, problem-solving, and a willingness to sit with faint things for a long time. Spanning an enormous distance across the sky, the Gum Nebula is one of the largest emission nebulae visible from Earth. Thought to be the remnants of multiple ancient supernovae, it forms a vast, diffuse bubble of ionised gas and dust. It’s almost invisible to the naked eye, but reveals remarkable structure when captured through Hydrogen Alpha, with soft, layered clouds stretching across the frame. To the lower left sits the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, around 160,000 light-years away. Its quiet presence adds scale to the scene, a reminder of just how deep this field extends beyond our own galaxy. This image involved a lot of learning and more than a little frustration. Exploring PixInsight and advanced blending techniques pushed my workflow further than usual, but seeing these subtle structures emerge made every hour worthwhile. Tracked using a Sky Watcher Star Adventurer 2i. For the colour base, 20 RGB frames were stacked at ISO 3200, 30 seconds, f/2.8. Hydrogen Alpha data was then blended in using three 120-second exposures and one 240-second exposure at f/1.8, ISO 3200, revealing the faint ionised hydrogen that forms the immense Gum Nebula. Size = 5833 × 7291 pixels Resolution = 42.5 megapixels Altar is a study in scale and restraint, a reminder that some of the largest structures in the universe only reveal themselves when you slow down enough to look for them.