Eta Carina: Into Darkness

After what feels like a summer of cloudy nights, its nice to finish a new image! I set up this APM scope last year and have been using it on a few longer term projects that I will hopefully finish this year and decided it was time to do some fine-tuning of the setup. So Eta Carina was selected as the target, and it was a nice change to be able to actually see some nebulosity on single subs compared to what I have been imaging.

Eta Carina reminds me of the misaligned warp core seen in Star Trek: Into Darkness, and you can imagine the massive amount of energy being pumped out that has sculpted all of the dust and molecular clouds in the area. I tried a few different framing options and settled on a crop to 1.65 x 1.35 degrees of the main core. I also took some 5 second exposures of the homunculus to not blow this out completely.