Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Puppis (Pup)
The Cometary Globule CG-4 in Puppis, @HalH75
The Cometary Globule CG-4 in Puppis
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The Cometary Globule CG-4 in Puppis

The Cometary Globule CG-4 in Puppis, @HalH75
The Cometary Globule CG-4 in Puppis
Powered byPixInsight

The Cometary Globule CG-4 in Puppis

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Description

More than 30 cometary globules (CG) have been found in the Gum Nebula since the late 1970’s that generally have dense, dusty heads and long faint tails pointing away from the center of the Vela OB2 association. The intricate structure evident in this Ha-enhanced RGB image of CG4, which probably originated from ablation of a relatively opaque neutral cloud by the fierce winds and radiation fields from that association’s massive stars, render it as one of the most striking examples. Several bright rims comprising hot ionized hydrogen are also evident that support this view. The serendipitous appearance of the nearly edge-on background galaxy ESO 257 – G019 pointing to a tight circlet of stars about 9-arcmin above the center of the globule’s head adds to the drama of the image, as does the presence of the bright star-forming cloud Sa 101 beneath the globule’s tail. Located in Puppis approximately 1300 lys away, the head of CG4 spans nearly 2.9 lys at its greatest projected width on the sky, and the emerging tail is another roughly 8 lys in length. East is up and north is to the right on this image whose overall field-of-view spans approximately a square-degree, corresponding to 23.3 lys on a side at the assumed distance. The data used to make this image were obtained by an FLI Proline16803CCD camera with an anti-blooming gate on Chilescope’s 0.5-m Telescope 2 before the nearly 3rd quarter moon rose on the nights of March 30th and April 26th of 2019.  Unbinned data were collected at the Newtonian focus through red, green, blue and H-alpha filters during 10-min exposures at an angular resolution of 0.9 arcsec/px. CCDStack v.2 was employed to form mean images from data collected in the R (40-mins), G, B and H-alpha (50-min each) bands, respectively, and a preliminary RGB result was used to create a synthetic luminance frame. Subsequent processing was performed with Photoshop CC 2018, which included  blending the synthetic luminance and red scenes with the mean H-alpha image to enhance detail in the final color product.

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The Cometary Globule CG-4 in Puppis, @HalH75