Imagine traveling to a star about 100 times as massive as our Sun, a million times more luminous, and with 30 times the surface temperature. Such stars exist, and some are known as Wolf Rayet (WR) stars, named after French astronomers Charles Wolf and Georges Rayet. The central star in this image is WR 40 which is located toward the constellation of Carina. Stars like WR 40 live fast and die young in comparison with the Sun. They quickly exhaust their core hydrogen supply, move on to fusing heavier core elements, and expand while ejecting their outer layers via high stellar winds. In this case, the central star WR 40 ejects the atmosphere at a speed of nearly 100 kilometers per second, and these outer layers have become the expanding oval-shaped nebula RCW 58 (
apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap230208.html).
This impressive nebula has an average radius of more than 8 light years. The nebula is at a aproximate distance of 9,000 light years, measured by parallax by Gaia.
The nebula luminosity in OIII is almost 100 times lower than the luminosity in Ha, judging by the proportion in ADU obtained with each filter. For that reason the 6 hours of data obtained (in a Bortle 8 sky) was barely enough to add to the picture. I hope to obtain more data with the OIII filter in the future.
The 2.25 hours obtained with the SII filter were not enough to contribute to the image.
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