This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows one of the most complex planetary nebulae ever seen, NGC 6543, nicknamed the "Cat's Eye Nebula." Hubble reveals surprisingly intricate structures including concentric gas shells, jets of high-speed gas and unusual shock-induced knots of gas. Estimated to be 1,000 years old, the nebula is a visual "fossil record" of the dynamics and late evolution of a dying star. A preliminary interpretation suggests that the star might be a double-star system. The suspected companion star also might be responsible for a pair of high-speed jets of gas that lie at right angles to this equatorial ring. If the companion were pulling in material from a neighboring star, jets escaping along the companion's rotation axis could be produced. These jets would explain several puzzling features along the periphery of the gas lobes. Like a stream of water hitting a sand pile, the jets compress gas ahead of them, creating the "curlicue" features and bright arcs near the outer edge of the lobes. The twin jets are now pointing in different directions than these features. This suggests the jets are wobbling, or precessing, and turning on and off episodically. This color picture, taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera-2, is a composite of three images taken at different wavelengths. (red, hydrogen-alpha; blue, neutral oxygen, 6300 angstroms; green, ionized nitrogen, 6584 angstroms). The image was taken on September 18, 1994. NGC 6543 is 3,000 light- years away in the northern constellation Draco. The term planetary nebula is a misnomer; dying stars create these cocoons when they lose outer layers of gas. The process has nothing to do with planet formation, which is predicted to happen early in a star's life.

The Dumbbell Nebula (also known as Apple Core Nebula, Messier 27, M 27, or NGC 6853) is a planetary nebula in the constellation Vulpecula, at a distance of about 1,360 light years.

Taken with 14.5" f7.0 RCOS telescope mounted on a Paramount ME, FLI PL16K camera at -35C, 80 mins of RGB, 150 mins of Luminance.

6 usable lights (60s), 10 darks, 20 flats, 20 bias. Canon EOS 450D DSLR prime focus, ISO1600. Baader Neodymium filter and coma corrector. Sky-Watcher 150P Explorer on EQ3-2 mount. DeepSkyStacker > PixInsight > PhotoShop.

This is M20, the Trifid Nebula. It's interesting because the pink and blue colors are very distinct when imaging this target. This lies in the dense star fields of Sagittarius and lies close by to M8, the Lagoon Nebula, and at the top of the image, M21, which got cut off when I cropped it. This is a result of over 30 minutes of exposures.

06/16/12

Joshua Tree National Park, CA

70 frames = 31 min 58 second exposure ISO 6400

Processed in DeepSkyStacker and Gimp 2

6" Meade Newtonian Reflector LXD75 EQ Mount

Canon Rebel T3 DSLR

Canon EOS 450D 20x 20s subs ISO800 Prime focus Skywatcher 150 Explorer Newtonian. Processed in DeepSkyStacker, PixInsight and Photoshop CS5

a very faint eso nebula, but none shall be intentionally skipped. it has a pretty interesting structure.

red: vlt/fors2 h_alpha

green: pseudo

blue: vlt/fors2 oiii

Image of the planetary nebula named Cat's Eye Nebula.

Equipment: Nikon D5300, Tamron SP 70-300mm f/4-5.6 Di VC USD lens, and iOptron Skytracker. Taken at 300mm, f/8.0, ISO 8000, 121 frames of 30 seconds each plus 60 darks. Stacked in Regim and cropped/processed in Lightroom.

Edited Hubble Space Telescope image of the nebula IC 4634. Color/processing variant.

Original caption: This striking Hubble image of the planetary nebula IC 4634 reveals two shining, S-shaped ejections from a dying star. This star, awash in glowing material at the centre of the picture, bloated as it aged and launched its outer layers off into space. The star’s very hot, exposed core has since beamed intense ultraviolet radiation at these lost shells of gas, making them glow in rich colours. This process has been far from orderly or calm, however, as revealed by the distinct, separate waves of thrown-off gases. One is more distant and therefore was spewed first, followed by a more recently ejected tide of matter that formed the tighter S-shape. The result is remarkably symmetric on each side of the central star. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) captured this image of IC 4634, which is found more than about 7500 light-years away in the constellation of Ophiuchus (the Serpent Holder). IC 4634 and other objects like it are known as planetary nebulae due to their appearance through early telescopes as rounded, faintly luminous discs similar to the distant planets Uranus and Neptune. The picture was created from images through five different filters (F487N, F502N, F574M, F656N and F658N) that captured light emitted by different elements in the gaseous features. The total aggregate exposure time was 4000 seconds and the field of view is just 29 arcseconds across.

Jones-Emberson 1 (PK 164+31.1) is a 14th magnitude planetary nebula in the constellation Lynx at a distance of 1600 light years. It is a larger planetary with low surface brightness. The 16.8-magnitude central star is very blue white dwarf.

Sadly I don't think I will be adding the OIII here.

SII is apparently very low...

Some flexure persists,and a breeze does not help this large tube

Linear NR, but Decon applied to stretched image...very low snr

28x900 seconds (bin 2)

12" f/4.6 Newtonian

ST10@-20C

Pixinsight

Recent previous attempt (Celestron 25 cm)

www.flickr.com/photos/daveh56/6820770263/in/photostream

Nice HaLRGB and more info here;

www.rc-astro.com/photo/id1163.html

Another (pre?)planetary nebula. Not the most visually appealing, but hey, it's bipolar and I haven't seen it before. The ACS' HRC seems to take lovely pictures of super bright objects, but when it comes to darker ones it gets pretty noisy. I guess the culprit would be exposure time. F814W ended up being especially noisy.

These data were collected as part of proposal 9463: Are OH/IR stars the youngest post-AGB stars?

Red: hst_9463_58_acs_hrc_f814w

Green: pseudo

Blue: hst_9463_58_acs_hrc_f606w

Edited Spitzer Space Telescope image of the Helix Nebula. Color/processing variant.

Original caption: A dying star is throwing a cosmic tantrum in this combined image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), which NASA has lent to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In death, the star's dusty outer layers are unraveling into space, glowing from the intense ultraviolet radiation being pumped out by the hot stellar core.

This object, called the Helix nebula, lies 650 light-years away, in the constellation of Aquarius. Also known by the catalog number NGC 7293, it is a typical example of a class of objects called planetary nebulae. Discovered in the 18th century, these cosmic works of art were erroneously named for their resemblance to gas-giant planets.

Planetary nebulae are actually the remains of stars that once looked a lot like our sun. These stars spend most of their lives turning hydrogen into helium in massive runaway nuclear fusion reactions in their cores. In fact, this process of fusion provides all the light and heat that we get from our sun. Our sun will blossom into a planetary nebula when it dies in about five billion years.

When the hydrogen fuel for the fusion reaction runs out, the star turns to helium for a fuel source, burning it into an even heavier mix of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. Eventually, the helium will also be exhausted, and the star dies, puffing off its outer gaseous layers and leaving behind the tiny, hot, dense core, called a white dwarf. The white dwarf is about the size of Earth, but has a mass very close to that of the original star; in fact, a teaspoon of a white dwarf would weigh as much as a few elephants!

The glow from planetary nebulae is particularly intriguing as it appears surprisingly similar across a broad swath of the spectrum, from ultraviolet to infrared. The Helix remains recognizable at any of these wavelengths, but the combination shown here highlights some subtle differences.

The intense ultraviolet radiation from the white dwarf heats up the expelled lay

Edited Chandra Space Telescope x-ray image of the Crab Nebula and how it looks optically, superimposed.

Original caption: In commemoration of the 15th anniversary of NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, four newly processed images of supernova remnants dramatically illustrate Chandra's unique ability to explore high-energy processes in the cosmos. The images of the Tycho and G292.0+1.8 supernova remnants show how Chandra can trace the expanding debris of an exploded star and the associated shock waves that rumble through interstellar space at speeds of millions of miles per hour. The images of the Crab Nebula and 3C58 show how extremely dense, rapidly rotating neutron stars produced when a massive star explodes can create clouds of high-energy particles light years across that glow brightly in X-rays.

NOAO image of the Dumbbell nebula showing fainter objects than is usual.

Thought the last one was gross? The Hubble just barely detected the nebulosity of this planetary nebula with these rather short exposures, which is why it appears so dark. This data was collected to specifically study the central star, not the nebula itself. This is one of the worse things in the archive, but at least you can see something. This isn't a hidden treasure by any means.

There are much better amateur observations of this nebula if pretty pictures are the priority.

Red: WFPC2 F814W

Green: pseudo

Blue: WFPC2 F555W

Hubble Space Telescope image of the Butterfly Nebula.

Processed version of an image from the Hubble Space Telescope of NGC 6818, a planetary nebula called the Little Gem Nebula.

Original caption: This colourful bubble is a planetary nebula called NGC 6818, also known as the Little Gem Nebula. It is located in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer), roughly 6000 light-years away from us. The rich glow of the cloud is just over half a light-year across — humongous compared to its tiny central star — but still a little gem on a cosmic scale. When stars like the Sun enter retirement, they shed their outer layers into space to create glowing clouds of gas called planetary nebulae. This ejection of mass is uneven, and planetary nebulae can have very complex shapes. NGC 6818 shows knotty filament-like structures and distinct layers of material, with a bright and enclosed central bubble surrounded by a larger, more diffuse cloud. Scientists believe that the stellar wind from the central star propels the outflowing material, sculpting the elongated shape of NGC 6818. As this fast wind smashes through the slower-moving cloud it creates particularly bright blowouts at the bubble’s outer layers. Hubble previously imaged this nebula back in 1997 with its Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, using a mix of filters that highlighted emission from ionised oxygen and hydrogen (opo9811h). This image, while from the same camera, uses different filters to reveal a different view of the nebula. A version of the image was submitted to the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures image processing competition by contestant Judy Schmidt.

Ghost of Jupiter NGC 3242 taken on 3-24-2018 with a Celestron C-1100 HD

Edited Hubble Space Telescope image of the planetary nebula NGC 7027. Color/processing variant.

Original caption: Recently, NGC 7027's central star was identified in a new wavelength of light ó near-ultraviolet ó for the first time by using Hubble's unique capabilities. The near-ultraviolet observations will help reveal how much dust obscures the star and how hot the star really is.

This object, which resembles a colorful jewel bug, is a visibly diffuse region of gas and dust that may be the result of ejections by closely orbiting binary stars that were first slowly sloughing off material over thousands of years, and then entered a phase of more violent and highly directed mass ejections. Hubble first looked at this planetary nebula in 1998. By comparing the old and new Hubble observations, researchers now have additional opportunities to study the object as it changes over time.

Planetary nebulas are expanding shells of gas created by dying stars that are shedding their outer layers. When new ejections encounter older ejections, the resulting energetic collisions shape the nebula. The mechanisms underlying such sequences of stellar mass expulsion are far from fully understood, but researchers theorize that binary companions to the central, dying stars play essential roles in shaping them.

NGC 7027 is approximately 3,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus.

Edited Spitzer Space Telescope image of the Helix Nebula. Color/processing variant.

Original caption: A dying star is throwing a cosmic tantrum in this combined image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), which NASA has lent to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In death, the star's dusty outer layers are unraveling into space, glowing from the intense ultraviolet radiation being pumped out by the hot stellar core.

This object, called the Helix nebula, lies 650 light-years away, in the constellation of Aquarius. Also known by the catalog number NGC 7293, it is a typical example of a class of objects called planetary nebulae. Discovered in the 18th century, these cosmic works of art were erroneously named for their resemblance to gas-giant planets.

Planetary nebulae are actually the remains of stars that once looked a lot like our sun. These stars spend most of their lives turning hydrogen into helium in massive runaway nuclear fusion reactions in their cores. In fact, this process of fusion provides all the light and heat that we get from our sun. Our sun will blossom into a planetary nebula when it dies in about five billion years.

When the hydrogen fuel for the fusion reaction runs out, the star turns to helium for a fuel source, burning it into an even heavier mix of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. Eventually, the helium will also be exhausted, and the star dies, puffing off its outer gaseous layers and leaving behind the tiny, hot, dense core, called a white dwarf. The white dwarf is about the size of Earth, but has a mass very close to that of the original star; in fact, a teaspoon of a white dwarf would weigh as much as a few elephants!

The glow from planetary nebulae is particularly intriguing as it appears surprisingly similar across a broad swath of the spectrum, from ultraviolet to infrared. The Helix remains recognizable at any of these wavelengths, but the combination shown here highlights some subtle differences.

The intense ultraviolet radiation from the white dwarf heats up the expelled lay

Because the color is somewhat distracting, this is a grayscale version of just the infrared data. I think the structure is most clearly visible in this single channel, monotone version.

Note at the nucleus of the nebula are some extra rings or arcs that are quite difficult to see in the color version.

I removed the diffraction spikes once again because they were very distracting and easy to confuse with the structure of the object.

Data from following proposal was used to create the image:

Characterization of the WFC3 IR Grisms

The filter represented here is WFC3/IR F140W

North is up.

I reworked the source files from this image and did a 2x drizzle with a crop in DSS. You can see more about this object at Wikipedia.

Note how the upper right area has some problems with alignment. This was because I wasn't aware of how important doing the drift alignment with all the equipment attached can be. Over the course of the series of exposures, there was field rotation and this appears as blurred stars. Remember, this is a half-size crop of the APS-C sensor. Imagine what it would be like with a Full Frame sensor! Also, the drizzle option seems to have added some strange "rings" around some of the brighter stars.

This is about 1 hour of lights with a ton of darks that have been accumulated over time.

I did a gradient subtraction, histogram stretching, and curves. I didn't see the need to do noise reduction as the image looks pretty good to me at the moment. PP with PixInsight LE.

Taken with the Pentax K10D and the Stellarvue SV4 scope at prime focus.

Here are the DSS settings:

Stacking mode: Custom Rectangle

Alignment method: Automatic

Drizzle x2 enabled

Cosmetic applied to hot pixels (Filter = 1 px, Detection Threshold = 99.0%)

Cosmetic applied to cold pixels (Filter = 1 px, Detection Threshold = 1.0%)

Stacking step 1 ->5 frames (ISO: 1600) - total exposure: 30 mn 4 s

RGB Channels Background Calibration: Yes

Per Channel Background Calibration: No

Method: Median

-> Offset: 24 frames (ISO: 1600) exposure: 1/4000 s

Method: Median Kappa-Sigma (Kappa = 2.00, Iterations = 5)

-> Dark: 16 frames (ISO : 1600) exposure: 6 mn 2 s

Method: Median Kappa-Sigma (Kappa = 2.00, Iterations = 5)

-> Dark Flat: 72 frames (ISO : 1600) exposure: 1/4000 s

Method:

Median Kappa-Sigma (Kappa = 2.00, Iterations = 5)

-> Flat: 24 frames (ISO: 1600) exposure: 1/4000 s

Method: Median Kappa-Sigma (Kappa = 2.00, Iterations = 5)

Stacking step 2 ->0 frames (ISO: 1600) - total exposure: -

RGB Channels Background Calibration: Yes

Per Channel Background Calibration: No

-> Offset: 24 frames (ISO: 1600) exposure: 1/4000 s

Method: Median Kappa-Sigma (Kappa = 2.00, Iterations = 5)

-> Dark: 30 frames (ISO : 1600) exposure: 30 s

Method: Median Kappa-Sigma (Kappa = 2.00, Iterations = 5)

-> Dark Flat: 72 frames (ISO : 1600) exposure: 1/4000 s

Method:

Median Kappa-Sigma (Kappa = 2.00, Iterations = 5)

-> Flat: 24 frames (ISO: 1600) exposure: 1/4000 s

Method: Median Kappa-Sigma (Kappa = 2.00, Iterations = 5)

Edited ESO image of the planetary nebula Abell 33 with its coincident star.

Original caption: Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile have captured this eye-catching image of planetary nebula Abell 33. Created when an aging star blew off its outer layers, this beautiful blue bubble is, by chance, aligned with a foreground star, and bears an uncanny resemblance to a diamond engagement ring. This cosmic gem is unusually symmetric, appearing to be almost perfectly circular on the sky.

NGC7635 is called the Bubble Nebula and is in the constellation, Cassiopeia. This picture was taken with an Orion Deep Sky Imager II using a Celestron 11" telescope at F/2 (Hyperstar). 16 images at 60 seconds each for a total of 16 minutes. Here's a link to a Wikipedia description:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_7635

Hubble Space Telescope image of the star SWB 1 and its nebula. This is just how SN1987A looked before it went kaboom. It would be nice to see this one explode as well - we're far enough away to be perfectly safe when it goes...

The Ring Nebula is a planetary nebula (which can be misleading because they have nothing to do with planets). A planetary nebula is an expanding shell of glowing gas that was thrown out into space by a dying star. The Ring nebula is about 2000 light years away.

This image was taken using the16" telescope at the St. George campus of the University of Toronto.

Hen 2-47 (ESO 127-16)

Planetary nebula

Source: Hubble Legacy Archive hlsp_heritage_hst_wfpc2_e12716_f502n

hlsp_heritage_hst_wfpc2_e12716_f555w

hlsp_heritage_hst_wfpc2_e12716_f656n

hlsp_heritage_hst_wfpc2_e12716_f675w

27/07/2008; Berettyóújfalu (downtown), Hungary.

The M27 (also known as Dumbbel nebula) is a planetary nebula in the costellation Vulpecula, at a distance of about 1360 light years.

scope: 70/500 SW refractor

guiding scope: 80/400 SW refractor

mount: Celestron CG-4 with SW EQ3 RA motor drive

guide: 12.5mm reticle eyepiece, TeleVue 2x barlow, manually guided

filter: Baader UHC-S nebula filter.

camera: Baader-ACF mod. Canon EOS 350D

cond. of exp.: 8x300sec @ iso 800 in primer focus

total time of exposure: 40 min

Limit of magnitude: about 17.

processing: Iris(composit, asinh, noffset, rgbbalance, sblur), PS(levels, curves); only dark correction was applied. No crop.

Edited Chandra Space Telescope x-ray image of the planetary nebula G292.0+1.8.

Original caption: In commemoration of the 15th anniversary of NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, four newly processed images of supernova remnants dramatically illustrate Chandra's unique ability to explore high-energy processes in the cosmos. The images of the Tycho and G292.0+1.8 supernova remnants show how Chandra can trace the expanding debris of an exploded star and the associated shock waves that rumble through interstellar space at speeds of millions of miles per hour. The images of the Crab Nebula and 3C58 show how extremely dense, rapidly rotating neutron stars produced when a massive star explodes can create clouds of high-energy particles light years across that glow brightly in X-rays.

Edited Chandra Space Telescope image of the planetary nebula IC 4593, seen in X-Rays. Inverted grayscale variant.

Image source: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/images/a-cosmic-amethy...

Original caption: On Earth, amethysts can form when gas bubbles in lava cool under the right conditions. In space, a dying star with a mass similar to the Sun is capable of producing a structure on par with the appeal of these beautiful gems.

As stars like the Sun run through their fuel, they cast off their outer layers and the core of the star shrinks. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have found a bubble of ultra-hot gas at the center of one of these expiring stars, a planetary nebula in our galaxy called IC 4593. At a distance of about 7,800 light years from Earth, IC 4593 is the most distant planetary nebula yet detected with Chandra.

This new image of IC 4593 has X-rays from Chandra in purple, invoking similarities to amethysts found in geodes around the globe. The bubble detected by Chandra is from gas that has been heated to over a million degrees. These high temperatures were likely generated by material that blew away from the shrunken core of the star and crashed into gas that had previously been ejected by the star.

This composite image also contains visible light data from the Hubble Space Telescope (pink and green). The pink regions in the Hubble image are the overlap of emission from cooler gas composed of a combination of nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen, while the green emission is mainly from nitrogen.

IC 4593 is what astronomers call a “planetary nebula,” a deceptive-sounding name because this class of objects has nothing to do with planets. (The name was given about two centuries ago because they looked like the disk of a planet when viewed through a small telescope.) In fact, a planetary nebula is formed after the interior of a star with about the mass of the Sun contracts and its outer layers expand and cool. In the case of the Sun, its outer layers could extend as far as the orbit of Venus during its red giant phase several billion years in the future.

In addition to the hot gas, this study also finds evidence for point-like X-ray source at the center of IC 4593. This X-ray emission has higher energies than the bubble of hot gas. The point source could be from the star that discarded its outer layers to form the planetary nebula or it could be from a possible companion star in this system.

A paper describing these results appears in the April 2020 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and is available online. The authors are Jesús A. Toalá (Instituto de Radioastronomía y Astrofísica (IRyA) in Michoacan, Mexico); M. A. Guerrero (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Granada, Spain); L. Bianchi (The Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland); Y.-H. Chu (Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica (ASIAA) in Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China); and O. De Marco (Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia).

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Chandra X-ray Center controls science and flight operations from Cambridge and Burlington, Massachusetts.

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/UNAM/J. Toalá et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI

Read more from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

For more Chandra images, multimedia and related materials, visit:

www.nasa.gov/chandra

I went to a PI workshop offered by RBA and came away with some understanding of how to create and use star masks for things like MT. I also learned how to do a better job of NR within PI. Lastly, I learned some better ways to handle DBE.

What I've ended up with in this image is slightly tighter stars and better background color to allow the nebulosity to show up. Compared with the image done previously from the same original source, you can see further detail in the nebulosity and the faint edges show up much better.

I'd like to take this same data set and try to work it a little more from scratch and see if I can get something better.

Note that the spaces between the stars still exhibits a brownish tinge - I attribute this mostly because I was shooting in heavily light polluted areas. Also, the stars are still oblong, but because they have been reduced in size, there's less sloppiness and the nebulosity shows up better.

Edited Hubble Space Telescope image of the planetary nebula NGC 6565. Color variant.

Original caption: A dying star’s final moments are captured in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The death throes of this star may only last mere moments on a cosmological timescale, but this star’s demise is still quite lengthy by our standards, lasting tens of thousands of years! The star’s agony has culminated in a wonderful planetary nebula known as NGC 6565, a cloud of gas that was ejected from the star after strong stellar winds pushed the star’s outer layers away into space. Once enough material was ejected, the star’s luminous core was exposed and it began to produce ultraviolet radiation, exciting the surrounding gas to varying degrees and causing it to radiate in an attractive array of colours. These same colours can be seen in the famous and impressive Ring Nebula (heic1310), a prominent example of a nebula like this one. Planetary nebulae are illuminated for around 10 000 years before the central star begins to cool and shrink to become a white dwarf. When this happens, the star’s light drastically diminishes and ceases to excite the surrounding gas, so the nebula fades from view. A version of this image was entered into the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures basic image competition by contestant Matej Novak.

NGC 6891

Planetary nebula in Delphinus.

Source: Hubble Legacy Archive

hst_08390_09_wfpc2_f502n_pc

hst_08390_09_wfpc2_f555w_pc

hst_08390_09_wfpc2_f658n_pc

Edited Chandra Space Telescope image of the planetary nebula IC 4593, seen in X-Rays. Color/processing variant.

Image source: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/images/a-cosmic-amethy...

Original caption: On Earth, amethysts can form when gas bubbles in lava cool under the right conditions. In space, a dying star with a mass similar to the Sun is capable of producing a structure on par with the appeal of these beautiful gems.

As stars like the Sun run through their fuel, they cast off their outer layers and the core of the star shrinks. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have found a bubble of ultra-hot gas at the center of one of these expiring stars, a planetary nebula in our galaxy called IC 4593. At a distance of about 7,800 light years from Earth, IC 4593 is the most distant planetary nebula yet detected with Chandra.

This new image of IC 4593 has X-rays from Chandra in purple, invoking similarities to amethysts found in geodes around the globe. The bubble detected by Chandra is from gas that has been heated to over a million degrees. These high temperatures were likely generated by material that blew away from the shrunken core of the star and crashed into gas that had previously been ejected by the star.

This composite image also contains visible light data from the Hubble Space Telescope (pink and green). The pink regions in the Hubble image are the overlap of emission from cooler gas composed of a combination of nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen, while the green emission is mainly from nitrogen.

IC 4593 is what astronomers call a “planetary nebula,” a deceptive-sounding name because this class of objects has nothing to do with planets. (The name was given about two centuries ago because they looked like the disk of a planet when viewed through a small telescope.) In fact, a planetary nebula is formed after the interior of a star with about the mass of the Sun contracts and its outer layers expand and cool. In the case of the Sun, its outer layers could extend as far as the orbit of Venus during its red giant phase several billion years in the future.

In addition to the hot gas, this study also finds evidence for point-like X-ray source at the center of IC 4593. This X-ray emission has higher energies than the bubble of hot gas. The point source could be from the star that discarded its outer layers to form the planetary nebula or it could be from a possible companion star in this system.

A paper describing these results appears in the April 2020 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and is available online. The authors are Jesús A. Toalá (Instituto de Radioastronomía y Astrofísica (IRyA) in Michoacan, Mexico); M. A. Guerrero (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Granada, Spain); L. Bianchi (The Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland); Y.-H. Chu (Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica (ASIAA) in Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China); and O. De Marco (Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia).

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Chandra X-ray Center controls science and flight operations from Cambridge and Burlington, Massachusetts.

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/UNAM/J. Toalá et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI

Read more from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

For more Chandra images, multimedia and related materials, visit:

www.nasa.gov/chandra

Edited Chandra Space Telescope x-ray image of Tycho's supernova remnant (because he's the person who described it first) superimposed on an optical view of the same object.

Original caption: In commemoration of the 15th anniversary of NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, four newly processed images of supernova remnants dramatically illustrate Chandra's unique ability to explore high-energy processes in the cosmos. The images of the Tycho and G292.0+1.8 supernova remnants show how Chandra can trace the expanding debris of an exploded star and the associated shock waves that rumble through interstellar space at speeds of millions of miles per hour. The images of the Crab Nebula and 3C58 show how extremely dense, rapidly rotating neutron stars produced when a massive star explodes can create clouds of high-energy particles light years across that glow brightly in X-rays.

Edited Hubble Space Telescope image of the star WR 31a, which is a Wolf-Rayet star - this type of star is very large and very energetic.

Original caption: Sparkling at the centre of this beautiful NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is a Wolf–Rayet star known as WR 31a, located about 30 000 light-years away in the constellation of Carina (The Keel). The distinctive blue bubble appearing to encircle WR 31a, and its uncatalogued stellar sidekick, is a Wolf–Rayet nebula — an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium and other gases. Created when speedy stellar winds interact with the outer layers of hydrogen ejected by Wolf–Rayet stars, these nebulae are frequently ring-shaped or spherical. The bubble — estimated to have formed around 20 000 years ago — is expanding at a rate of around 220 000 kilometres per hour! Unfortunately, the lifecycle of a Wolf–Rayet star is only a few hundred thousand years — the blink of an eye in cosmic terms. Despite beginning life with a mass at least 20 times that of the Sun, Wolf–Rayet stars typically lose half their mass in less than 100 000 years. And WR 31a is no exception to this case. It will, therefore, eventually end its life as a spectacular supernova, and the stellar material expelled from its explosion will later nourish a new generation of stars and planets.

The Dumbbell Nebula (also known as Messier 27, M 27, or NGC 6853) is a planetary nebula (PN) in the constellation Vulpecula, at a distance of about 1,360 light years.

2hrs combined, 3min subs.

Skywatcher Explorer 190 MN Pro telescope,Skywatcher EQ6 Pro mount., Scopos 80mm guide scope. Starlight Xpress SXV M25C camera, SX Lodestar guide camera, Astronomik CLS light pollution filter. Processed and acquired using Maxim DL5, Photoshop CS2. Harrold Observatory, Harrold, Bedfordshire, UK. 25-07-09 / 26-07-09

Lucky shot ! While taking a picture of the M97 planetary nebula and the M108 galaxy, a plane fly along the diagonal of the photograph, its lights are around theses 2 objects !

Canon 350D Baader

Takahashi FS60 refractor (diameter 60mm , focal 355mm).

EQ6 Goto

4 x 3min, 800 ISO

Processed with Iris (dark, flat, offset, registration, addition, white balance, levels, wavelet, color enhancing) and Photoshop (levels and remaining hot pixels removed).

Location: Lentillac du Causse (Lot - France).

Date: 12/05/2010 - 21h20 to 21h31 UT.

Auto-guiding didn't work, so the tracking isn't good.

The sky wasn't clear, there was thin clouds. As a consequence, we can see a halo around the bright stars (and there is more noise).

The previous M57 photo, upsampled 3x. Blown up to show the central star within the planetary nebula

Stars are squiggly from a poorly aligned telescope mount, and from the target being too far from the center of the image.

Planetary Nebula in Cygnus

Orion Optics SPX-250 f/6.3 Newtonian

Atik 314L+ Mono

Baader LRGBHa filters

L: 20x30s

RGB: 10x30s

Ha: 2x120s

This is M27, the Dumbbell Nebula. This image paints a similar future of our very own Sun. Billions of years from now, the Sun will loose its outer layers and expell them into space, just as this star did. A fellow astronomer a few hundred to a few thousand lightyears away orbiting a different star, may see a similar scene peering towards us. By then, the year will be roughly 5 billion A.D.

06/16/12

Joshua Tree National Park, CA

23 frames = 11 min 0 second exposure ISO 6400

Processed in DeepSkyStacker and Gimp 2

6" Meade Newtonian Reflector LXD75 EQ Mount

Canon Rebel T3 DSLR

IC 4663

Planetary nebula in Scorpius.

Source: Hubble Legacy Archive

hst_07501_65_wfpc2_f555w_pc

hst_07501_65_wfpc2_f658n

20 lights (20s ISO800) 20 flats 11 darks 20 bias. Canon EOS 450D prime focus Skywatcher 150 Explorer Newtonian. Calibrated and stacked in DeepSkyStacker. Processed in PixInsight and Photoshop CS5

LATEST VERSION: flic.kr/p/2nyMLns

Messier 27 / M27 / NGC 6853 / The Dumbbell Nebula

295 x 10 seconds (49 minutes 10 seconds); seeing 3/5, transparency 4/5

Canon T3i (stock)

Canon EF-S 55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS Telephoto Lens

f/5.6 ISO800

Off-brand motorized equatorial mount (similar to Orion EQ-1)

Bortle Class 6 (Charlottesville, VA)

Hubble Space Telescope image of the planetary nebula NGC 2452, which has a pulsating white dwarf in the middle.

Edited Hubble Space Telescope image of the Cat's Eye Nebula. (I darkened the colors a bit to bring out detail which led to the outer-most layers of the nebula becoming very dark.)

Processed version of an image from the Hubble Space Telescope of NGC 6818, a planetary nebula called the Little Gem Nebula.

Original caption: This colourful bubble is a planetary nebula called NGC 6818, also known as the Little Gem Nebula. It is located in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer), roughly 6000 light-years away from us. The rich glow of the cloud is just over half a light-year across — humongous compared to its tiny central star — but still a little gem on a cosmic scale. When stars like the Sun enter retirement, they shed their outer layers into space to create glowing clouds of gas called planetary nebulae. This ejection of mass is uneven, and planetary nebulae can have very complex shapes. NGC 6818 shows knotty filament-like structures and distinct layers of material, with a bright and enclosed central bubble surrounded by a larger, more diffuse cloud. Scientists believe that the stellar wind from the central star propels the outflowing material, sculpting the elongated shape of NGC 6818. As this fast wind smashes through the slower-moving cloud it creates particularly bright blowouts at the bubble’s outer layers. Hubble previously imaged this nebula back in 1997 with its Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, using a mix of filters that highlighted emission from ionised oxygen and hydrogen (opo9811h). This image, while from the same camera, uses different filters to reveal a different view of the nebula. A version of the image was submitted to the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures image processing competition by contestant Judy Schmidt.

Edited Chandra Space Telescope image of the planetary nebula IC 4593, seen in X-Rays.

Image source: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/images/a-cosmic-amethy...

Original caption: On Earth, amethysts can form when gas bubbles in lava cool under the right conditions. In space, a dying star with a mass similar to the Sun is capable of producing a structure on par with the appeal of these beautiful gems.

As stars like the Sun run through their fuel, they cast off their outer layers and the core of the star shrinks. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have found a bubble of ultra-hot gas at the center of one of these expiring stars, a planetary nebula in our galaxy called IC 4593. At a distance of about 7,800 light years from Earth, IC 4593 is the most distant planetary nebula yet detected with Chandra.

This new image of IC 4593 has X-rays from Chandra in purple, invoking similarities to amethysts found in geodes around the globe. The bubble detected by Chandra is from gas that has been heated to over a million degrees. These high temperatures were likely generated by material that blew away from the shrunken core of the star and crashed into gas that had previously been ejected by the star.

This composite image also contains visible light data from the Hubble Space Telescope (pink and green). The pink regions in the Hubble image are the overlap of emission from cooler gas composed of a combination of nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen, while the green emission is mainly from nitrogen.

IC 4593 is what astronomers call a “planetary nebula,” a deceptive-sounding name because this class of objects has nothing to do with planets. (The name was given about two centuries ago because they looked like the disk of a planet when viewed through a small telescope.) In fact, a planetary nebula is formed after the interior of a star with about the mass of the Sun contracts and its outer layers expand and cool. In the case of the Sun, its outer layers could extend as far as the orbit of Venus during its red giant phase several billion years in the future.

In addition to the hot gas, this study also finds evidence for point-like X-ray source at the center of IC 4593. This X-ray emission has higher energies than the bubble of hot gas. The point source could be from the star that discarded its outer layers to form the planetary nebula or it could be from a possible companion star in this system.

A paper describing these results appears in the April 2020 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and is available online. The authors are Jesús A. Toalá (Instituto de Radioastronomía y Astrofísica (IRyA) in Michoacan, Mexico); M. A. Guerrero (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Granada, Spain); L. Bianchi (The Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland); Y.-H. Chu (Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica (ASIAA) in Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China); and O. De Marco (Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia).

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Chandra X-ray Center controls science and flight operations from Cambridge and Burlington, Massachusetts.

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/UNAM/J. Toalá et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI

Read more from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

For more Chandra images, multimedia and related materials, visit:

www.nasa.gov/chandra

Between Thanksgiving dinner and Moonrise I only had about an hour, so I chose a target with a high surface brightness - a planetary nebula. There are many of these scattered across the sky, the best known probably being the Ring Nebula and the Dumbbell Nebula. Planetary nebulae are created when an aging star blows off its outer layers and then lights it up with its radiation. Planetary nebulae come in a large variety of shapes and sizes, and they are generally symmetrical.

This particular nebula is called the Blinking Nebula because in smaller scopes it can only be seen with averted vision - when you look right at it it disappears. So if you glance back and forth it appears to blink on and off. In my 8" scope it is a nearly-circular grey patch, and the central star is very obvious.

I took this image by attaching my camera to my SCT with a 3X Barlow. This gave me a much smaller field of view, but gives me many more pixels on this tiny target, giving me more target data to process. There was no field flattener or coma corrector here - since the camera is only grabbing the centre of the focal plane there is much less focal aberration - in fact, I didn't even use flat frames, and the resulting stacked image was still very flat.

This image was created from 29 one-minute frames, and all processing was done in Images Plus. The nebula has no colour processing - the colour you see is exactly what the camera captured.