NGC 1360

This large beautiful planetary nebula can be found in the constellation Fornax. Its common name, “The Robin’s Egg Nebula” describes the object perfectly. It looks like a Robins egg floating in space. NGC 1360 is a typical evolved planetary nebula. The term evolved means “aging”, and that the planetary nebula does not contain any obvious shell morphology. Contrasting this, if you compare this with another planetary nebula, i.e., “The Skull Nebula” you will find defined well-marked boundaries and symmetry present in younger Planetary Nebula (PN). NGC 1360 is fairly diffuse and showing areas interacting with the interstellar medium.

 

The interesting colour is caused by the excitation of oxygen from its hot central star. In fact, the central star is known to be a binary star system consisting of two evolved white dwarf stars.

 

Reddish jet like glows located along the longer axis are believed to have been ejected from the original star before its final collapse. In time, everything will fade, with just the white dwarf in the centre remaining. It will take several billion years to finally cool off.

 

The image was constructed using five filters, Luminance, Red, Green, Blue, and Hydrogen-Alpha (Ha). The total imaging time is 65.75 hours.

 

 

Field of View / Plate Solving

Center (RA, Dec):(53.307, -25.868)

Center (RA, hms):03h 33m 13.730s

Center (Dec, dms):-25° 52' 06.408"

Size:37 x 24.7 arcmin

Radius:0.371 deg

Pixel scale:0.804 arcsec/pixel

Orientation:Up is 47.1 degrees E of N

 

Exposure Details:

Lum 75X900

Red 35X450

Green 36X450

Blue 49X450

Ha 32X1800

Total time 65.75 hours

 

Instruments Used:

10 Inch RCOS fl 9.1

Astro Physics AP-900 Mount

SBIG STL 11000m

FLI Filter Wheel

Astrodon Lum, Red, Green, Blue Filters

Baader Planetarium H-alpha 7nm Narrowband-Filter

 

Software Used

CCDStack (calibration, alignment, data rejection, stacking)

Photoshop CS 6 (Image processing)

 

Thanks for looking

Done