Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Methuselah Nebula, MWP1, project finalized
Planetary Nebulae are like candy of the cosmos, small and colorful treats to the eye.
MWP1 is a Planetary Nebula in constellation Cygnus, the Swan, it's rarely imaged and now I know why.
This is a unusually old, unusually shaped and unusually large planetary nebula, it also was one of the most difficult targets I have captured so far.
When I saw the first 20 min. exposure, it looked like there is plenty of nothing in the frame, this is dim to an extreme. I have added full size 20 min sub frames of H-alpha and O-III at the end of this blog post so you can see yourself how much data there is.
MWP1, Methuselah Nebula
Click for a full size image
Click for a full size image
Photo is in natural color palette from the light emitted by an ionized hydrogen (H-alpha)
and an ionized oxygen (O-III)
MWP1 in O-III light only
Click for a full size image
The structure of MWP1 in light of an ionized oxygen (O-III)
INFO
This is one of the largest planetary nebulae known, it spans about 15 light-years. Based on its expansion rate the nebula has an age of 150 thousand years, a cosmic blink of an eye in the 10 billion year life of a sun-like star. But planetary nebulae represent a very brief final phase in stellar evolution, as the nebula's central star shrugs off its outer layers to become a hot white dwarf. In fact, planetary nebulae ordinarily only last for 10 to 20 thousand years.
The central star of the nebula is on of the hottest stars known. It's so hot that it's producing large amounts of X-rays
Source NASA APOD
Scale in the Sky
The white circle show the apparent size of the Moon in the same scale, this is a large object as a Planetary nebula. Moon has a angular dimension of 30 arcminutes, that's 0.5 degrees.
Animation
Technical details
Processing workflow
Image acquisition, MaximDL
Stacked and calibrated in CCDStack2.
Deconvolution with a CCDStack2, Positive Constraint, 27 iterations, added at 50% weight
Color combine in PS CS3
Levels and curves in PS CS3.
Imaging optics, Celestron EDGE 14" with 0.7 Focal reducer
Mount, MesuMount Mark II
Cameras, Imaging camera Apogee Alta U9000M and Apogee seven slot filter wheel
Guider camera, Lodestar x 2 and SXV-AO Active Optics @ 5hz
filters, Astrodon 5nm H-alpha and 3nm O-III
Total exposure time 24h
H-alpha, 21 x 1200 s, binned 1x1 = 8 h
O-III, 48x 1200 s, binned 1x1 = 16h
A single, full size, 20 min H-alpha and O-III exposure
Click for a full scale image.
Both images below are jpg photos of a single full size, 20 min. FIT-format 16 bit image.
Photos are calibrated with darks and bias corrected flats and are heavily stretched to show even a hint of the actual nebula.
H-alpha
O-III
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