Sorry about the bazillion frame listings -- I should probably just not list the temperature. It's:
- Ha: 94x300s (7h50m)
- OIII: 103x300s (8h35m)
- SII: 114x300s (9h30m)
Finally finished another one -- Sh2-101, the Tulip Nebula! 26 hours total exposure time over the summer.
I've imaged this one once before, but with my color camera and the Optolong L-eXtreme duo-narrowband filter, which was basically all red hydrogen:
www.astrobin.com/8g7qb8/This time, it's with my monochrome camera, shooting through individual narrowband filters -- selecting the hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur emissions from the energized gas around the stars. This is colored with the Hubble palette: sulfur is red, hydrogen is green, and oxygen is blue (from longest wavelength light to shortest). In reality, both sulfur and hydrogen glow a deep red, but the Hubble palette allows you to differentiate them (and makes pretty colorful images
)
Now, probably the coolest part of this image is that it features a black hole! An extremely bright x-ray source was discovered at this location in 1971, labeled Cygnus X-1, and has since been measured to have a mass 21.2 times the mass of the Sun, but less than 50 km across -- a very massive, very compact object! The black hole makes a binary system with a blue supergiant variable star called HDE 226868, which orbits at a distance of only 0.2 AU (20% the distance from the Sun to the Earth), orbiting each other every 5.5 days! The black hole has a pair of relativistic jets, and you can see the shock front that is formed on one side (this side is more dense with gas and dust). It is estimated that the jet emits 1000 times more power than the Sun. The bow shock is the blue semi-circle to the right of the Tulip; the binary system with the black hole is the lower of the two bright stars just underneath the bow shock. (I've got an annotated image here:
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=844406007686107&set=pcb.844411691018872)
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