These nebulae were a complete surprise to me, and an afterthought one night as I was putting away my gear after a long session! I was waiting for my camera to warm to ambient (even though it was only 22°F out!) and thought I’d slew over to the constellation Auriga to catch a glimpse of the “Flaming Star Nebula” (bottom left). I was amazed at how much detail there was with a single 3-minute exposure. It immediately became the next-up on my list of objects. Only when I was doing some research, I saw that I could probably frame the Tadpoles Nebula in the same photo.

The Flaming Star Nebula gets its name as the ionizing star, Auriga AE, looks like it’s being heated from the fiery nebula below, with wisps of smoke rising. Truthfully, it’s the other way around—the star is ionizing the hydrogen within the nebula, as well as blowing the clouds of gas and eroding the bizarre flame-like shapes.

The Tadpoles nebula is really neat to me as well. You can see small little pillars of gas/dust near the blueish bits. Those are the little tadpoles swimming around. The blue parts of the nebulae come from doubly-ionized oxygen, which is really a greenish blue, but I pushed toward blue for contrast.

It is pretty crazy to me the difference in distances between these two nebulae. They look like they’re neighbors, but the Flaming Star is much, much closer. The Tadpoles Nebula is around 12,000 LY distant, while the Flaming Star is a “mere” 1,500 LY away! This makes IC 410 (Tadpoles) over 100 lightyears across!

These two pictures are the same data, but I got creative after processing the first picture, and swapped color channels in Photoshop. I do love the blue hues in the 2nd photo! Which is your favorite?? Let me know!