NGC2346 The Butterfly Nebula - The Dance of Two Stars (Franklin Marek)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Monoceros (Mon) · Contains: NGC 2346 · PK215+03.1

NGC2346 The Butterfly Nebula - The Dance of Two Stars

NGC2346 in Foraxx HOO palette.

Not a whole lot of amateur images of this one. It is quit small and had to push drizzling and plenty of strong dithering to bring out as much detail as I could. Effective f/ ratio of f/12 at this resolution on my 120ST.

I did take deep long exposures of the broader area and there really isn't much at all surrounding this nebula. I did an annotated zoomed out version even highlighting various types of stars and galaxies and only 2 galaxies and a handful of variable, red branch, and carbon stars. Really nothing else!

The other thing I find just absolutely surprising is this was created by a dance of two stars. They orbit so tightly their period is only 16days and is only split by spectroscopy. When one went into a red giant phase the other star just plowed through the outer layers of it shredding it apart and flinging it into these two lobes you see.

Close in crop and annotated version below.

Link to video I made for this image: https://youtu.be/OnoFk9Hez9Q

Comments appreciated!

Zoomed Out Annotated:

Final
Original
B

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9211764
PixInsight job	0CZ0QW22A9P89D4QIPR10OU31AFCMSFQ
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	07h09m22s.625
RA (top/left)	07h09m57s.497
RA (top/right)	07h09m55s.875
RA (bottom/right)	07h08m47s.817
RA (bottom/left)	07h08m49s.431

Dec (center)	-00°48′25″.18
Dec (top/left)	-01°02′49″.58
Dec (top/right)	-00°33′45″.51
Dec (bottom/right)	-00°33′59″.99
Dec (bottom/left)	-01°03′04″.19

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NGC2346 The Butterfly Nebula - The Dance of Two Stars

NGC2346 The Butterfly Nebula - The Dance of Two Stars

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NGC2346 The Butterfly Nebula - The Dance of Two Stars

NGC2346 The Butterfly Nebula - The Dance of Two Stars

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