Sh2-101 Tulip Nebula, with Cygnus X-1 Bow shock
There are many DSO’s scattered around CYG in the sky. Gas clouds, either as remnants of the life of ancient stars, or as birthplace for new ones. Or just gas that gets lit up by nearby stars, or emit their own light, aka emission nebulae, like the Tulip nebula, Sharpless 101 …
But what makes this object and area in space so much more interesting is the proximity of Cygnus X-1, the first discovered black hole - determined to be a black hole after a long running wager between Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne. Detected through its strong X-ray signal, the relativistic jets, perpendicularly radiating from the accretion disk of the black hole, colliding with the interstellar material to form the curved shock front (noticeable in the Oiii signal - blue) at the right of the Tulip.
Cygnus X-1 belongs to a high-mass
X-ray binary system, located about 2.22 kilo
parsecs from the
Sun, that includes a blue
supergiantvariable star designated
HDE 226868, which it orbits at about 0.2 AU, or 20% of the distance from Earth to the Sun.
TS140, ASI2600MM, CEM70
HO 79x 23x 300s = 8:30 hrs
20220717-20220722
PixInsight
Captured in Ha and Oiii and currently processed as straight HOO, but maybe I’ll have a go at re-doing the processing similarly as my
Cygnus Wall, hoping to achieve a colour palette with a bit more variation. The image could’ve been helped with some more Oiii, but the moon was coming into play, adding more Oiii data will have to wait.
Clear Skies everybody! 🤩✨🔭
Follow me @astrowaut
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