The Flaming Star

Last night I turned the Dwarf 3 smart telescope toward one of the sky’s more dramatic deep-sky objects, the Flaming Star Nebula (IC 405) in the constellation Auriga. Slowly stacking exposures revealed a tangled blaze of glowing hydrogen and dusty filaments, giving the nebula its wonderfully evocative name.

The nebula’s fiery appearance comes from energetic radiation emitted by the bright blue star AE Aurigae, which sits embedded within the cloud. This star has quite a story. Astronomers believe it was violently ejected from the Orion Nebula region around 2–3 million years ago after a gravitational encounter between multiple massive stars. It now tears through space at around 100 km per second, effectively ploughing through the surrounding gas and lighting it up as it goes.

IC 405 lies roughly 1,500 light-years away, yet spans about 5 light-years across. The glowing regions are created when AE Aurigae’s intense ultraviolet radiation excites hydrogen gas, causing it to shine in deep red emission, a classic feature of many nebulae captured in astrophotography.