Recording description
Recorded with my Boren-Simon 10″ telescope and Apogee Ultra 8300 CCD with narrow band filters:
Luminance #1: 20 minutes (Boren Simon, 10″ and Apogee Ultra 8300 CCD)
Luminance #2: 30 minutes (T18, iTelescope.net)
RGB: 10,10,10 minutes
Processed with: MaximDL (stacking + DDP), PI (aligning and color combine), PS (features)
Object description
Maia Nebula / NGC 1432 is a star in the constellation of Taurus. It is the fourth-brightest star in the Pleiades open star cluster (M45), after Alcyone, Atlas and Electra, in that order. Maia is a blue giantof spectral type B8 III, and a mercury-manganese star.
Maia’s visual magnitude is 3.871, requiring darker skies to be seen. Its total bolometric luminosity is 660 times solar, mostly in the ultraviolet, thus suggesting a radius that is 5.5 times that of the Sun and a mass that is slightly more than 4 times solar. It was thought to be a variable star by astronomer Otto Struve. A class of stars known as Maia variables was proposed, which included Gamma Ursae Minoris, but Maia and some others in the class have since been found to be stable.
Maia is one of the stars in the Maia Nebula (also known as NGC 1432), a bright emission or reflection nebula within the Pleiades star cluster.
Source: Wikiepedia