For half a year, the BAT dedicated many scopes to search for activity in Hubble's Variable Nebula and create an animation showing its changing nature. The goal was to shoot from many different locations, to prevent weather from halting the animation. This project was very successful. Large scale variations in the nebula were very scarce during this observing period with only a small shadow transiting in the lower left part of the nebula. But taking a closer look at the animation, fast moving shadows, similar to ripples in a pond, emanating from the star can easily be spotted. These are not imaging or processing artefacts but actual brightness variations due to the star’s variability. As the nebula spans about 1 light year in size, we can thus perfectly observe these shadows, traveling through space at the speed of light!
Such an effect has to our knowledge previously only been documented by the Hubble Space Telescope in its famous animation of the nebulosity surrounding the star RS Puppis:
https://esahubble.org/videos/heic1323a/The data presented here spans from October 2021 - April 2022 using a 5-day averaging of submitted stacks. The BAT is looking forward to next year's observing period with hopefully also more large scale variations in Hubble’s Variable Nebula.
Due to GIF compression we also supplied a uncompressed file in the following link.
NGC2261_LRGB_season_2021-22_18fps.avi - Google DriveThis target was managed and post processed by
@MrCrazyPhysicist , thank you for taking your time for such an awesome project!
Please check the link below if you're interested in the BAT!
Thank you for contributing data:
@HatManDew
@TheCyberBrick
@Nlawrie94@SPACEVISON
@zac@poptart
@Astrobob
@reglogge@Wayne@[SF.FS]elSchalbei
@mladen
@TheBatMan
@AstroGlide@joelkuiper@Astro1tu@Konstantin Schäfer@Martin Schoenmaker@Daniel DAS AIRAS@Aris
@Dogface
@Space_Madness@timmayy22
@alphan
@MrCrazyPhysicist
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