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The Evil Eye: Extreme cropped close-up of a very small but complex planetary nebula, Rick Veregin

The Evil Eye: Extreme cropped close-up of a very small but complex planetary nebula

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
The Evil Eye: Extreme cropped close-up of a very small but complex planetary nebula, Rick Veregin

The Evil Eye: Extreme cropped close-up of a very small but complex planetary nebula

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Description

I’m calling NGC 6058 the Evil Eye, so please view with discretion. I could not find any other name for this complex PN.

At 13000 light years away it looks small to us, only 43” across, but is in reality it is nearly 3 l-y in size. The envelope is expanding at 27.5 km/s, and which doing some math means that gas may have been ejected as much as 10,000 years ago. In fact, as shown by a 2013 paper, there are four distinct outflows of gas that were ejected between about 3400 to 5900 years ago, each in a different direction. The speed of these outflows is even higher, with 68 km/sec measured for three of them. The extent of these outflows is show in Image B, please see my gif animation, showing my image, the outflows (my tracing of the outflows in the paper), and the image from the 2013 paper with the outflows.

Credit where credit is due. My hat is off to @Gary Imm , who, as always, is ahead of the curve, and has shown his own version of this PN with a nice review of the science. Thanks for the reference and info, Gary, in your post, I followed your lead here!

At times I thought I was wasting my time collecting so much data on such a small target. I kept hoping to pick up more of the fainter nebulosity, but at the point I stopped I would have needed a lot more integration to get much more. But I was happy though with the S/N in the core, which enabled me to bring out a lot of nice detail.

I calibrated and stacked my subs in DeepSkyStacker with 2X drizzle. In StarTools I did a wipe (background extraction), digital development, HDR, deconvolution, multi-scale sharpening, color, and Super Structure Isolate. I finalized the image in Photoshop with some color adjustments, APF-R (multi-scale unsharp mask, as used by NASA), and NoiseXterminter. Finally I did a big crop for the close-up you see here, then a 4X upscale in stages for the final image. The gif animation was also done in Photoshop at the same scale.

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  • Final
    The Evil Eye: Extreme cropped close-up of a very small but complex planetary nebula, Rick Veregin
    Original
  • The Evil Eye: Extreme cropped close-up of a very small but complex planetary nebula, Rick Veregin
    B

B

Description: Animation comparing
1) My color image
2) My image inverted grey-scale
3) My grey-scale with four outflows
4) OIII only image with four outflows from 2013 paper

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The Evil Eye: Extreme cropped close-up of a very small but complex planetary nebula, Rick Veregin