Astro Anarchy: A Supernova Remnant poster

Monday, February 7, 2011

A Supernova Remnant poster

A collection of Supernova remnants in scale

Note! There is now an image of a full Moon as a scale.

I made this poster to show relative sizes of the Supernova remnants. All SNR's in this poster are in same scale.

A full size image, or if an image is smaller, an image holder( dark gray), covers 259' horizontally (4,3 degrees)

NOTE, there are zoomed versions from M1 and IC 443, they are not in scale, the smaller versions of them are in scale with rest of the images.

Images are in HST-palette, mixed from the emission of ionized elements, Sulfur, Hydrogen Oxygen, by a a following method:

Red = S-II, Green = H-alpha and Blue = O-III

All images are shot from my urban observatory in very centrum of city Oulu, Finland. There is two zoomed versions of images in the poster, first one is M1, the "Crab Nebula" and the second one is IC 443, the "Jellyfish Nebula". Specially the M1 has so much smaller angular diameter, that it has to be scaled up, in this scale, to see any details.

A supernova remnant (SNR) is the structure resulting from the gigantic explosion of a star.

The supernova remnant is an expanding shock wave and consists of ejected material expanding from the explosion.
There are two possible routes to a supernova:

1. A massive star may run out of fuel and collapsing inward under the force of its own gravity to form a neutron star or a black hole.

2. A white dwarf star accumulate material from a companion star until it reaches a critical mass and undergoes a thermonuclear explosion.