NGC 7662 • Blue Snowball Planetary Nebula (Douglas J Struble)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Andromeda (And) · Contains: Copeland's Blue Snowball · NGC 7662

NGC 7662 • Blue Snowball Planetary Nebula, Douglas J Struble

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NGC 7662 • Blue Snowball Planetary Nebula

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NGC 7662 • Blue Snowball Planetary Nebula

This was a very challenging planetary nebula. The core is rather small and bright. I had to capture OIII data with two different exposures much like the Cat's Eye Nebula, although a bit smaller. The OIII, Ha and RGB data was assembled in Photoshop in different layers with different masks.

Caldwell 22, also cataloged as NGC 7662 and nicknamed the Snowball Nebula or Blue Snowball Nebula, is a planetary nebula located about 2,500 light-years from Earth. Nebulae like these represent a stage in evolution that stars like our Sun undergo when they run out of fuel. Stars are nuclear furnaces that spend most of their lives fusing hydrogen into helium. Massive stars have fiery fates, exploding as supernovae, but medium-mass stars like the Sun swell to become red giants as they exhaust their fuel.

The process begins when, after billions of years of nuclear fusion, the star starts to shut down. Gravity (no longer balanced by the outward pressure created by nuclear fusion) compresses the stellar core. The star’s outer layers of gas puff away into space, creating a planetary nebula (so named because these objects often resemble planetary orbs when viewed through a small telescope). At the center lie the remains of the original star’s compressed core, a small white dwarf. One day our Sun will meet a similar fate, but it has enough fuel to last another 6 billion years or so.

Planetary Nebulae

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3999996
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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NGC 7662 • Blue Snowball Planetary Nebula

NGC 7662 • Blue Snowball Planetary Nebula

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NGC 7662 • Blue Snowball Planetary Nebula

NGC 7662 • Blue Snowball Planetary Nebula

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