Sharpless 106 - A Star-Forming Region


This is an image of the star-forming region Sharpless 106, taken on May 12th 1996 by Mark McCaughrean. This image shows the full field-of-view of 6.8 x 6.8 arcminutes, taken through a broadband Km filter (covering 1.94 to 2.35 microns). The image shown is a combination of seven images taken at slightly dithered positions on the sky. Each of these is a straight co-add of fifteen 2 second images, so the total integration time in the final image shown here is 210 seconds. Five sky images, each 15x2 seconds, were taken at different points on the sky and combined to remove background stars, before being subtracted from the source images. As always, north is up and east is to the left.

These data were taken near the zenith, during sunrise. The weather was good and the seeing was about 1.1 arcsec FWHM. The image has been scaled logarithmically to show the full dynamic range of the nebula and stellar cluster. Some slight coma in the stellar images is visible, due to a small misalignment of the Omega-Prime optics, which has since been eliminated.