Saturday, August 26, 2023

The Bubble Nebula

Today I present the Bubble Nebula, NGC 7635, taken over six nights, from July 17 to August 22, with my EdgeHD11 scope and ASI2600mm camera. The best images (those that are very noise free) require a long amount of integration time. I rarely spend multiple nights to get one image with the rarity of clear nights here in Maryland, but I wanted an image that would really stand out.

The Bubble Nebula - July/August 2023
EdgeHD11 OTA with ASI2600mm Camera
29.5 hours integration time (NB and RGB Filters)

The Bubble Nebula is 7 light-years across and resides 7,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia. The "bubble" is created by the stellar wind from a massively hot young central star. The nebula lies near a giant molecular cloud in space (which can be seen across the image as the yellowish-red cloud).  The bubble nebula itself is being excited by that hot central star (just to the right of the center of the bubble), causing it to glow. It was discovered in November 1787 by William Herschel.

Here is the Hubble telescope image of the same object for comparison.

Bubble from Hubble



The Dumbbell Nebula - M27

Getting around to completing the postprocessing of a number of astro objects in my backlog. Part of my backlog of image runs, this image con...