Mz 3 Ant Nebula - Hubble Legacy Archive data (Kharan)

Mz 3 Ant Nebula - Hubble Legacy Archive data

The nights are still too bright for imaging and I was getting bored so I made my first foray into HLA. It was a fun experiment.

This is from WFPC2 with f673 and f487 filters.

wiki: Mz 3 (Menzel 3) is a young bipolar planetary nebula in the constellation Norma that is composed of a bright core and four distinct high-velocity outflows that have been named lobes, columns, rays, and chakram. These nebulosities are described as: two spherical bipolar lobes, two outer large filamentary hour-glass shaped columns, two cone shaped rays, and a planar radially expanding, elliptically shaped chakram.[4][5] Mz 3 is a complex system composed of three nested pairs of bipolar lobes and an equatorial ellipse.[6] Its lobes all share the same axis of symmetry but each have very different morphologies and opening angles.[6] It is an unusual PN in that it is believed, by some researchers, to contain a symbiotic binary at its center.[5] One study suggests that the dense nebular gas at its center may have originated from a source different from that of its extended lobes.[5] The working model to explain this hypothesizes that this PN is composed of a giant companion that caused a central dense gas region to form, and a white dwarf that provides ionizing photons for the PN.[5]

Mz 3 is often referred to as the Ant Nebula because it resembles the head and thorax of a garden-variety ant.

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Status	Basic failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	1173220
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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