Tagged: Planetary - Adam Lundie - Eatons Hill Observatory

When stars like the Sun are near end of life, they send their outer layers into space to create glowing clouds of gas, a planetary nebulae. This ejection of mass is uneven, and planetary nebulae can have complex shapes. This dying star is moving rapidly through space, resulting in a long tail of ionized hydrogen gas.

Perhaps too small of an object for amateur equipment to tease out any details, I decided to try my luck on the Little Gem Nebula. NGC 6818 is roughly 6000 light-years away from Earth. The glow of the cloud is just over half a light-year across.

The Red Spider Nebula (also catalogued as NGC 6537) is a planetary nebula located near the heart of the Milky Way.

A glowing shell of ionized gas ejected from a dying star, IC5148 is at the end of its life, shedding its outer layers and contracting from a red giant to a white dwarf.

Shapley 1 is a planetary nebula in the southern sky with a magnitude 14 white dwarf at it's center. It is approximately 4900 light years away, and one third of a light year across.

NGC4361 is a planetary nebula with spiral arms similar to a galaxy. The star at the center of the nebula is shedding its outer layers while contracting to form a white dwarf.

After a brief hiatus from astronomy to build a new, larger observatory, I've chosen another difficult target that was surprisingly bright.

Stars such as our Sun do not contain enough mass to finish their lives in the glorious explosions known as supernovae. However, they are still able to salute their imminent demise into dense, Earth-sized embers called white dwarfs by first expelling colourful shells of gas known as planetary nebulae.

The Saturn Nebula is a tiny but complex planetary nebula, ~4000 light years away in Aquarius. The Saturn Nebula gets its name from its resemblance to the planet Saturn to the observer.

NGC 1360 is known as the Robin's Egg Nebula, primarily due to its blue hue from strong oxygen-III emissions. It is a diffuse planetary nebula 1794 light years away. Presented is a narrowband image with H-alpha emissions mapped to red, and OIII emissions mapped to both green and blue (HOO palette).

Next to the Lagoon Nebula, there lies the often overlooked collection of absorption, reflection and emission nebulae: NGC 6559, IC 1274, IC 1275, IC 4684, IC 4685, Barnard 303, LDN 227, LDN 213, and planetary nebula PN M 1-41.

Narrowband images are rarely presented as true color light. When imaging in narrowband, colors are assigned to each channel based on the specific emission lines captured. One of the most common choices is the SHO Hubble Pallet, but the choices for mixing colors are endless. Here are 9 examples of how an image of a planetary nebula may be colored.

For my first foray into narrowband imaging, I have chosen a very dim & difficult target: planetary nebula Sh2-313, also known as Abell 35 and PK 303+40.1