The blue Dolphin Nebula
The blue Dolphin Nebula
This cosmic bubble is created by fast winds from a hot, massive Wolf-Rayet star.
It lies some 5,200 light-years away toward the constellation of the Big Dog (Canis Major) and covers slightly more of the sky than a Full Moon. That corresponds to a diameter of 60 light-years at its estimated distance. The windblown nebula has an age of about 70,000 years.
This image was captured with the ASA500N telescope and FLI PL16803 camera from Telescope Live in El Sauce Observatory, Chile.
Combined my own data from an advanced request with data from a one-click observation...
Total exposure time was 80 minutes: 4 sub-frames of 600s with both H-alpha and OIII filters were used to create this HOO-image. The relatively faint emission captured in this image is dominated by the glow of ionized oxygen atoms (blue hue).
Processing with Astro Pixel Processor, Photoshop CC incl. AstroPanel V4.2, Astronomy Tools and Denoise Projects 3 plug-ins
Comments
This is really great image!
Great colour rendition in this beautiful image. A long, LONG ago i wrote a research paper on this object; it's striking to see how imaging technology has progressed (check Plate 1 of http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1986MNRAS.222..809H)!
Stunning. Would love to know more about the Club as I live in Belgium.
Thanks Francesco! You can find more info on the website of our astronomy club: www.astrofoto.be
These pics can also be found on my personal website (www.nachthemel.be)
Thanks! I will check.
Thats a lovely picture. Really nice and unlike a lot of Nebula it really does look like a Dolphin. Are these images on TL copyright or can I post them to my favourite astrophotography groups on Facebook... Basically sharing and advertising TL?
Hello Daniel. No problem for me if you share this picture on pages of other astrophotography groups, as long as you give "credits" to me (who made this image) & the use of the TL infrastructure. I posted the same picture on my instagram account (nachthemel.be) or facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/nachthemeldrongen) (the fb-page in Dutch :) )
Hi Daniel, we can also confirm that you don't necessarily need to credit or quote Telescope Live. Obviously, it's very much appreciated if you do :)
absolutely stunning!
thanks!