Located 655 lightyears away in Aquarius is the famous Helix nebula. The Helix nebula is one of the most extensively studied and imaged planetary nebula, and has a number of very interesting structures, including small central cometary knots, large-scale emission arcs, and a bipolar outflow causing bow-shaped filaments and shocks.
When planning this project, I came across a paper by Zhang et al discussing a possible halo around the Helix nebula. On Galex UV images, they detected a very faint possible NE jet, a SW bow shaped filament and a diffuse Southern Halo. I decided to take a deep image of the Helix to see if I could detect these infrequently seen features in Ha emission. I had also noticed on some images, faint OIII emission occurring around the NE and SW arc’s and wanted to see if I could clearly define this OIII emission.
© Zhang et al, The Astrophysical Journal
Data was captured with my Nikon 400mm f/2.8 including all of the nebulosity data seen here, but I did add some of the brighter stars from some data I had from my APM LZOS refractor. I used drizzle integration, and the outer faint halo was processed using continuum subtraction and carefully masked to not blow out the brighter inner ring.
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