Oct 19, 2025
IC 1805 - The Heart Nebula
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IC 1805 - The Heart Nebula
The Heart Nebula, Sh2-190 // Barry Li
Be My Valentine l IC 1805 l Adam Jensen
IC 1805 // The Heart Nebula. Photo taken and processed by me.
This is the heart nebula (or at least as much of it as I can take with my setup without doing a mosaic) also known as IC 1805 or NGC 896. It is around 7 000 light years from us, in the constellation Cassiopeia. Despite its distance to us it still appears about twice as big as the moon in the sky, which speaks volumes when it comes to its actual size (about 200 light years in diameter).
This being an emission nebula its light mostly comes from gasses ionised by nearby stars.
This nebula also has an open cluster at it's center (a bit closer to us than the rest of the nebula), Melotte 15:
This cluster is bout 1,5 million years old which is very young for such a stellar object. It is composed a a few very heavy and bright stars and many fainter lighter stars.
The starless version :
(Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera and Baader 6.5nm narrowband filter. 25x300s for the Ha filter, 26x300s for the SII filter and 26x300s for the OIII filter, total imaging time 6h 25min, stacking and processing done in PixInsight. Photo taken mid-January) Other versions with a different colour combinations (a bit less pleased of how they turned out).
If you want to see the nebula in its entirety, you can check out this NASA Astronomy picture of the day made by Adam Jensen.
IC 1805 - the Heart Nebula (SHO)
A two-panel mosaic of the core of the Heart Nebula, which boasts a gorgeously defined set of clouds amid a field of ionized oxygen (shown here in blue).
Shot at 1600mm f/8 with 1 hour per channel per panel, 7nm bandpass. IMX533 sensor (ASI533MM Pro camera).
Unless otherwise noted, all images on my blog were shot from Bortle 7 skies in my backyard just outside of Boston.
From Astronomy Picture of the Day; October 21, 2025:
IC 1805: The Heart Nebula Image Credit & Copyright: Toni Fabiani What electrifies the Heart Nebula? First, the large emission nebula on the left, catalogued as IC 1805, looks somewhat like a human heart. The nebula glows brightly in red light emitted by its most prominent element, hydrogen, but this long-exposure image was also blended with light emitted by silicon (yellow) and oxygen (blue). In the center of the Heart Nebula are young stars from the open star cluster Melotte 15 that are eroding away several picturesque dust pillars with their atom-exciting energetic light and winds. The Heart Nebula is located about 7,500 light years away toward the constellation of Cassiopeia. At the top right of the Heart Nebula is the companion Fishhead Nebula. This wide and deep image clearly shows, though, that glowing gas surrounds the Heart Nebula in all directions. Starship Asterisk* APOD Discussion Page for Today’s Image
The APOD website is down due to the government shutdown, however new images are still being posted to the website’s discussion forum and mirror sites.
Open star cluster at the center of Cosmic Heart