Star Falling (HFG1)
Planetary nebula HFG1 (PK 136+05)
HFG1 is an old, faint, and thus rarely imaged planetary nebula in Cassiopeia. Its most distinctive feature, the blue bowshock, results from this ball of expanding gas bowling through the interstellar medium at between 29 and 59 kilometers per second, leaving behind a trail of gasses. A planetary nebula forms when a sunlike star reaches the advanced age where it first becomes a bloated red giant star, and then throws off the star’s outer shell of gasses when the core collapses to form a white dwarf star. In the case of HFG1, the central white dwarf star V664 Cas is accompanied by a smaller star that is so close it completes each orbit in only about 14 hours. HFG has expanded for approximately 10,000 years, to the point where the nebula is about one lightyear across.
Telescope: .5 meter Planewave CDK20 telescope
Camera: FLI PL9000 monochrome camera
Location: Sierra Remote Observatories in California
Date: October 18 through November 10 of 2018
Exposure time: 48.5 hours of Hα data (97x 30min subframes), 36 hours of OIII (72x30min), and 5.7 hours combined for RGB (stars only). So total image exposure time is over 90 hours.
Processing: PixInsight and Photoshop
Note: This is a stacked single target image. Only the bad (overscan and alignment overlapped) edges of the frame were cropped out.
See on Fluidr
To see more of my work and to buy prints visit www.jklovelacephotography.com/pages/space
Star Falling (HFG1)
Planetary nebula HFG1 (PK 136+05)
HFG1 is an old, faint, and thus rarely imaged planetary nebula in Cassiopeia. Its most distinctive feature, the blue bowshock, results from this ball of expanding gas bowling through the interstellar medium at between 29 and 59 kilometers per second, leaving behind a trail of gasses. A planetary nebula forms when a sunlike star reaches the advanced age where it first becomes a bloated red giant star, and then throws off the star’s outer shell of gasses when the core collapses to form a white dwarf star. In the case of HFG1, the central white dwarf star V664 Cas is accompanied by a smaller star that is so close it completes each orbit in only about 14 hours. HFG has expanded for approximately 10,000 years, to the point where the nebula is about one lightyear across.
Telescope: .5 meter Planewave CDK20 telescope
Camera: FLI PL9000 monochrome camera
Location: Sierra Remote Observatories in California
Date: October 18 through November 10 of 2018
Exposure time: 48.5 hours of Hα data (97x 30min subframes), 36 hours of OIII (72x30min), and 5.7 hours combined for RGB (stars only). So total image exposure time is over 90 hours.
Processing: PixInsight and Photoshop
Note: This is a stacked single target image. Only the bad (overscan and alignment overlapped) edges of the frame were cropped out.
See on Fluidr
To see more of my work and to buy prints visit www.jklovelacephotography.com/pages/space