Corona Australis

Close to the galactic center of the Milky Way, next to Sagittarius, we find this amazing area in the Corona Australis constellation. Full of cosmic dust clouds, this area shows a rich field of stars, with several hidden gems across the field, such as several tiny galaxies hidden behind the main scene.

With a blueish color we can see a reflection nebulae group catalogued as NGC 6726, 6727, 6729 and IC 4812. The characteristic blue color is produced as the light from hot stars is reflected by the cosmic gas. The dust also obscures from view stars in the region still in the process of formation. Smaller yellowish nebula NGC 6729 surrounds the young variable star R Coronae Australis.

This star scape also includes the amazing NGC 6723 globular star cluster, that lies some 30,000 light-years away, further away than the denser clouds of this region, that are found some 500 light-years away from us and that block light from more distant background stars.

I captured this image with my portable telescope on my last trip to Tivoli Astrofarm, Namibia, last September 2022. It was a memorable trip that I’ll never forget.

The full image shown above covers an area of 4º26′ x 2º56′ at a resolution of 2.59″/pixel.

I have applied an HDR techinques using the short R,G,B exposures that allowed me to recover several details on the bright areas of the image.

A special mention to Astronomy Picture of the Day for its excellent page that helped me to document the text above.