NGC 6888 Crescent Nebula (Joe Niemeyer)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cygnus (Cyg) · Contains: Crescent Nebula · NGC 6888

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NGC 6888 Crescent Nebula

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NGC 6888 Crescent Nebula

And now for something truly bizarre -- The Crescent Nebula (catalog NGC 6888). It is an emission nebula in the constellation Cygnus and about 5000 light-years away from Earth. This cosmic bubble is 25 light years across and was formed from two shock waves produced by a red giant star that collapsed about 250,000 years ago. The red giant blew off all of its hydrogen and left behind a rare compact Wolf-Rayet star (WR 136) composed of ionized helium, nitrogen, carbon, and heavy elements. These types of stars are extremely hot and produce strong stellar winds. The fast stellar wind from WR 136 hit the ionized hydrogen from the original red giant and produced outward and inward shock waves, leaving behind this bizarre shell of ionized hydrogen. The central WR star will eventually supernova. I can't wait! Astronomers refer to this object as the Crescent Nebula, but I have always thought they should have called it the Brain Nebula. Don't you agree?

I made this image from thirty 300-second exposures through my Baader dual-bandpass filter (Hα and OIII) at 2345mm prime focal length, calibrated with 20 each dark, flat, and dark flat frames. I stacked the frames with Astro Pixel Processor, breaking out a separate luminance frame for post processing. The stack was then post-processed with Photoshop utilizing the StarXTerminator, Astronomy Tools, and Topaz DeNoise AI plugins.

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The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5019442
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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NGC 6888 Crescent Nebula

NGC 6888 Crescent Nebula

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NGC 6888 Crescent Nebula

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