Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Dorado (Dor)  ·  Contains:  IC 2128  ·  NGC 1929  ·  NGC 1934  ·  NGC 1935  ·  NGC 1936  ·  NGC 1937
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
N 44 a Large Magellanic Cloud Super Bubble (HOrgb – TrueColor), Alex Woronow
Powered byPixInsight

N 44 a Large Magellanic Cloud Super Bubble (HOrgb – TrueColor)

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
N 44 a Large Magellanic Cloud Super Bubble (HOrgb – TrueColor), Alex Woronow
Powered byPixInsight

N 44 a Large Magellanic Cloud Super Bubble (HOrgb – TrueColor)

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

OTA:……………….CDK17

Camera:………….SBIG STXL11002 with AOX and FW8G (0.63 arsec/pxl)

Observatory:…. Heaven's Mirror, Chile

EXPOSURES:

…O.….11 x 1800

…H.….20 x 1800

…R…..8 x 900 sec.

…B…..7 x 900

…G….5 x 900

Total exposure 20.5 hours

Image Width: 40 arc-minutes

Processed by Alex Woronow (2020) using PixInsight, Skylum, Topaz, SWT

Sculpted by the out-streaming of gas and radiation from a group of about 40 young, blue stars, this Super Bubble lies in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The most active single star in the cluster ejects material at 100M times the rate of our sun--a total of 10^15 tons of material/year.

I find the diversity of textures encountered across the nebulae as one of the most intriguing attributes of this image. The somewhat smooth clouds, lacking any clearly organized internal structures, appear dominant—as is typical--but at the right wall of the main bubble consists of long strings of clouds, perhaps composed of echelons of expanding shockwaves. Other HII-dominated (red) similar versions of these structures appear in other parts of the image. The teal stringy structures (OII emissions) may share a shock-front origin, with their star-driven source must lie hidden behind them.

At least as interesting, a somewhat cobbled nebula texture occurs at about 7:00. It lies adjacent to a smoother area, although it may be behind it from our perspective. That same type of ribbed and cobbled texture appears at other locations within the nebula, e.g., upward from this and in some outlying nebulae. Some of these unusual areas have a discernable hint of linearities, maybe indicating disrupted regions where shock-fronts once appeared or regions where shock-fronts are just beginning to ionize the gases in patches and reveal the linear fronts.

I have seen these cobbled regions in other nebula images and have worried that they arose from noise reduction methods chopping up smoother terrains. However, the last two images I did had these smoothed and cobbled terrains adjacent to one another and even intermixed with one another. This relationship argues strongly against the textures being processing artifacts. Furthermore, the cobbled structures' scale exceeded that of other undeniably real structures, so it is not merely noise. Furthermore, my foolish attempts to diminish the cobbled texture, as if it were noise, turned the entire image into a powder-puff cloud. Perhaps with better resolution and deeper exposures, the cobbles will turn into linear fronts or condensation regions or something new. There is hope as more and more images posted on Astrobin trend away from the blurry-cloud nebulae representation toward the details-revealed paradigm.

Cheers, Alex Woronow

Comments

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

N 44 a Large Magellanic Cloud Super Bubble (HOrgb – TrueColor), Alex Woronow