I think the bubble nebula may be my one of favorite targets to date. There is just something captivating about a bubble of gas sitting in space. When you throw a rock into a pond you see a ripple travel through the water. That ripple might even even travel the entire width of the pond. It boggles my mind to think "ripples" of gas are traveling through the universe, but instead of pond size the ripples are light years in size. In the case of the bubble nebula a very big star that is 45 times the size of our sun and hundreds of thousands of time brighter, has sent out its own ripple of stellar wind The star's stellar wind has blown gas from around it, and the gas is contained in a tight bubble by a molecular cloud that happens to be in the same area. The bubble we see in the picture is actually 10 light years across.
In astrophotography half the battle is taking the photos through the night. However the other half of the battle is putting all of that data together to get your final picture. I have tried several programs to get those final images and tend to use Pixinsight and StarTools the most. The first picture is the final picture using Pixinsight. It is probably the best representation of the nebula in terms of color, but the StarTools picture turned out decent as well. These pictures just show that there is a lot of complex interactions going on when you combine 70 two minute exposures. Every time you combine the data the final result is going to be a little different.
No comments:
Post a Comment