After a week of astrophotographical safari, it is nice to be home among familiar cats and with access to our own bed. The safari quarry was Deep Sky Objects (DSOs) – nebulae, galaxies and clusters.
Over the next week, I will be posting the processed images of my quarry. All of these images were taken with a Canon 6D Mark II DSLR camera coupled with a SkyWatcher 80mm f/5 APO astrograph.
Tonight, I am posting a final image of NGC7293 – The Helix Nebula in the constellation Aquarius. I posted a not-quite-ready-for-prime-time version from Casitas de Gila a few days ago as an Amuse-Bouche (a teaser). This image consists of the same data, but it has been corrected for various noise sources.
The Helix nebula is a planetary nebula (a type of emission nebula), and it has nothing to do with planets. Planetary Nebulae are formed when a star the size of our own sun or perhaps no more than eight times larger reaches the end of its life as a Red Giant star. The star ejects its outer shell of gas, and the remaining stellar material, the core of the star, radiates these gases causing them to glow. Okay, that’s the high-school student’s explanation. It works for me.
The Helix Nebula is sometimes called The Eye of God or the Eye of Sauron for fans of the Lord of the Rings. I have always been entranced by planetary nebulae. As a child, I thought The Ring Nebula in the constellation Leo most beautiful.
Below are two images of The Helix. The first is a severely cropped version meant to bring out the fine details of the nebula. The second is the original wide-field frame meant to put the nebula into context in the field of the astrograph. The image is the composite of 10, 6-minute exposures taken at ISO 6400.
