View allAll Photos Tagged PlanetaryNebula
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
NGC 7026
Planetary nebula in Cygnus.
Source: Hubble Legacy Archive
hst_07501_08_wfpc2_f502n_pc
hst_07501_08_wfpc2_f555w_pc
hst_07501_08_wfpc2_f658n_pc
NGC 5315
Planetary nebula in Circinus
Source: Hubble Legacy Archive hst_06119_22_wfpc2_f555w_pc hst_06119_22_wfpc2_f814w_pc
Edited Chandra Space Telescope x-ray image of the Crab Nebula showing a jet from its pulsar.
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. 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:
Hubble Space Telescope image of supernova remnant SNR 0509-67.5. Such a banal name for such a pretty nebula.
Image by Richard Ford
55 Second Exposure
ISO 1600
03/08/2013
23:13:12
Stacked in Deep-Sky Stacker
Processed in Photo Plus X4
12-inch Dobsonian Reflector Telescope
Dobtorial Tracking Platform
Canon 1100DSLR Camera
Canon EOS 450D prime focus Skywatcher 150 Explorer Newtonian. 20 lights (20s ISO1600), 10 darks, 20 flats, 20 bias. DeepSkyStacker, PixInsight, Photoshop CS5
PNG006.4+02.0
Planetary nebula
Source: Hubble Legacy Archive hst_09356_23_wfpc2_f502n_pc
hst_09356_23_wfpc2_f656n_pc
M 76 is a planetary nebula in the constellation Perseus. This tiny nebula is the remnant of a dying star.
15 exposures @ 240 sec, ISO 1600 Camera: Canon EOS 1000D Instrument: Meade 102/700mm APO Refractor.
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. Decided to have another go as disappointed in previous attempt at processing
M27, or Dumbbel nebula is one of three planetary nebulae in Messier's catalogue.
18 exposures @ 300 sec, ISO 400 Camera: Canon EOS 1000D Instrument: Meade 102/700mm APO Refractor.
Edited Chandra Space Observatory image of the supernova remnant G11.2-03.
Original caption: New Chandra observations of the G11.2-0.3 supernova remnant in our Galaxy have stripped away its connection to an event recorded by the Chinese in 386 CE. Recent Chandra data show that dense gas clouds lie along the line of sight from the supernova remnant to Earth, obscuring it in optical wavelengths. This image of G11.2-0.3 shows low-energy X-rays in red, the medium range in green, and the high-energy X-rays detected by Chandra in blue. The X-ray data have been overlaid on an optical field from the Digitized Sky Survey, revealing stars in the foreground.
The Helix Nebula is a faint, large planetary nebula. Because of the size of this target, I used the Maksutov Cassegrain to go after this target. This scope is a 127mm aperture f12 design, yielding approximately 1500 mm focal length. As always, I use the full spectrum modified Pentax K10D camera with a peltier cooler.
This is a stack of 37 subs of 10 minutes at 400 ISO taken over the course of 3 nights. Because the target is so low on the southern horizon I have not been able to get a lot of data. Also, there have been challenges of transparency, focus, dew, and tracking.
All this is made more complex by this target being so dim that even at the above-noted sub details, the main ring structure of the nebula was not visible. Only at higher ISO settings or longer exposures does the structure appear. I was not prepared to deal with either step.
These challenges have given a lot of poor subs that I finally found a way to stack without compromising too much of the results.
Each evening's data was calibrated with Maxim as a set. The resutls were debayered and then stacked in Pix Insight. The rest of the processing included some white balance, DBE, ATrous Wavelet, and a lot of stretching. There's a lot of residual background noise. Not much I can do about these without more subs.
While I'd like to get more data, there's a storm coming and it's not likely that I'll get another chance to add more information on this target until next year.
Here's the data on the plate solve:
Referentiation Matrix (Gnomonic projection = Matrix * Coords[x,y]):
+0.000026298746 -0.000210188757 +0.170099721975
+0.000210359351 +0.000026359299 -0.360611368341
+0.000000000000 +0.000000000000 +1.000000000000
Resolution ........ 0.763 arcsec/pix
Rotation .......... 97.159 deg
Focal ............. 1460.00 mm
Pixel size ........ 5.40 um
Field of view ..... 40' 23.0" x 25' 38.0"
Image center ...... RA: 22 29 38.160 Dec: -20 48 21.19
Image bounds:
top-left ....... RA: 22 30 21.938 Dec: -21 09 59.06
top-right ...... RA: 22 30 43.145 Dec: -20 29 53.52
bottom-left .... RA: 22 28 32.909 Dec: -21 06 47.33
bottom-right ... RA: 22 28 54.590 Dec: -20 26 42.64
*This is a reprocessing of old image data. Trying to bring out more of the nebula and changing up the color.
-Object Info-
Name: M27
Other names: Dumbbell Nebula, NGC6853
Type: Planetary Nebula
V Mag: 13.7
-Image Info-
Date: July 20, 2010
Location: Florida Tech, Melbourne, FL
Telescope: Ortega .8m
Imager: FLI 1024x1024
CCD Temp: -20 C
Filters: Clear
Exposure: L 3 x 300s / RGB 3 x 300s each
Total Exposure: 60min
Calibration: 40 bias, 20 dark, LRGB 8 flats each
Processing: calibrated in IRAF, combined in Maxim DL, deconvolved in CCDSharp, post processed in Photoshop
In the image North is up and East is to the left.
Credit: Don Schumacher
As soon as I saw a photograph of Abell 31 taken by Kathy Walker, I just knew I had to create a pastel sketch of it!
Abell 31 is an ancient planetary nebula in the constellation of Cancer, thought to be about 2,000 light years away. Although it's quite large, it is quite faint.
To sketch this I used Stabilo CarbOthello pastel pencils on black paper, using the technique of scraping pastel dust onto the paper then blending with a dry, fluffy paint brush.
Photographing sketches that are on black paper on a sunny day is hellishly difficult, but I'm really pleased with the final result.
Music: Slow Trap y Anton Vlasov, from pixabay.com
Edited European Southern Observatory image of the planetary nebula Abell 33. Color/processing variant.
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.
A "planetary nebula", formed by a dying star expanding and puffing off its outer layers.
3 x 10-minute exposures at ISO 1600, f10. Off-axis, manually guided. Frames registered and stacked using DeepSkyStacker. Unmodded Canon EOS 40D & Celestron C8 telescope.