Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cancer (Cnc)  ·  Contains:  IC 523
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Abell 31 • Sh2-290 Planetary Nebula in HaOIIIRGB, Douglas J Struble
Abell 31 • Sh2-290 Planetary Nebula in HaOIIIRGB
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Abell 31 • Sh2-290 Planetary Nebula in HaOIIIRGB

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Abell 31 • Sh2-290 Planetary Nebula in HaOIIIRGB, Douglas J Struble
Abell 31 • Sh2-290 Planetary Nebula in HaOIIIRGB
Powered byPixInsight

Abell 31 • Sh2-290 Planetary Nebula in HaOIIIRGB

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I hope all of you are doing well and staying safe. We have a saying here; April Showers Bring May Flowers. We haven't had too many clear nights during our Shelter in Place order here in Michigan, which has been a major bummer. Even with the amount of integration time I did, it was super faint and had to really push the data. The RGB data was just for the stars.

Abell 31 (also known as Sh2-290) is a planetary nebula of nearly ten light-years wide, located about 2,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Cancer. Although it is one of the largest planetary nebulae of the sky, Abell 31 is not very bright. Its central star is a tiny white dwarf (about 4 times bigger than Earth or about 0.04 times the size of the Sun), which is incredibly hot, about 85,000° Celsius (150,000°F). It has about half the mass of the Sun, meaning it probably started out life as a star with about twice the mass of our Sun, and lost the rest as it aged and its stellar winds blew its outer envelope away. Judging from how fast those winds are blowing outward, the star probably started dying about 130,000 years ago, after a billion or more years of normal life.

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Abell 31 • Sh2-290 Planetary Nebula in HaOIIIRGB, Douglas J Struble