Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cygnus (Cyg)  ·  Contains:  Blinking Planetary  ·  NGC 6826
My old friend Blinki - aka NGC6826, Okke_Dillen
My old friend Blinki - aka NGC6826
Powered byPixInsight

My old friend Blinki - aka NGC6826

My old friend Blinki - aka NGC6826, Okke_Dillen
My old friend Blinki - aka NGC6826
Powered byPixInsight

My old friend Blinki - aka NGC6826

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

Blinki - its official name is NGC 6826 aka The Blinking Planetary - was one of my first planetaries and the first one I encountered by furtune while actually swaying to a different target. Recently I revisited it to check if I would be able to resolve structures inside of it. And, it worked! I knew from earlier attempts with the 6"RC (the antecessor of my 10"RC) that it also has a "skirt", a faint blue halo. But it has a comparable dynamics in brightness like the Cat's Eye which makes it hard to show both in a reasonable way. Either the core is too bright to enjoy or the halo remains invisible. So, I decided to split this in two seperate takes, one for the core, one for the halo. This image is the first part showing the core. The halo will follow....

Blinki is bright, very brigh, and its blinking effect is due to its exeptionally bright central star, which is a white dwarf, actually a dead star. It is one of the brightest known central stars of planetaries which allowed me to ignore the moon - ok, supported by a UHC-filter. Therefore, only 11 minutes of total exposure time were enough for this image already.

Its distance from Earth is some 2200 LY and the size visible in this picture is almost 0.4 LY across - for comparison, our solar system measures some 10 light-hours across when we see the Kuiper Belt as a border. It's not. There is still the Oort Cloud measuring 3.2LY across resp. 2x10^5 AU.

Comments

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

My old friend Blinki - aka NGC6826, Okke_Dillen