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Today’s feature is called the Ring Nebula, for obvious reasons. Over two hundred years ago, the famous English astronomer William Hershel found this object to resemble the planet newly discovered by him, Uranus, and so introduced the term “Planetary Nebula.” This class of objects, which are typically round, are created by dying stars that blow off their outer layers, once their central supply of hydrogen is exhausted. The remnant central star is a dense "white dwarf," that can no longer support nuclear reactions. Although this fate awaits our own sun, we have a few billion years before "the sun goes down" on us.
The Ring Nebula was the second “planetary nebula” to be discovered, in January 1779. The first was the Dumbbell Nebula, discovered fifteen years earlier. This image combines 51 minutes luminence (binned 2x2) with 15 minutes red and green, and 12 minutes blue exposures (binned 3x3 for RGB). I used an ST10XME camera through a 12" Meade LX200R at f10, at the Hidden Lake Observatory.
The image has a surprise….look for the faint galaxy at the bottom that looks like a backwards “S.” Whereas the Ring Nebula is about 2000 light years away, this galaxy (IC 1296) is about 200 million light years distant! |
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