The Helix Nebula — sometimes called the "Eye of God." What we see here is the death of a star that used to be a lot like our Sun. The white dwarf that remains is visible in the center of the image. Our own solar system will be just as pretty in about 5 billion years.
An excellent explanation from NASA:
"Planetary nebulae are actually the remains of stars that once looked a lot like our sun. These stars spend most of their lives turning hydrogen into helium in massive runaway nuclear fusion reactions in their cores. In fact, this process of fusion provides all the light and heat that we get from our sun. Our sun will blossom into a planetary nebula when it dies in about five billion years.
"When the hydrogen fuel for the fusion reaction runs out, the star turns to helium for a fuel source, burning it into an even heavier mix of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. Eventually, the helium will also be exhausted, and the star dies, puffing off its outer gaseous layers and leaving behind the tiny, hot, dense core, called a white dwarf." --
https://www.nasa.gov/.../imagegal.../image_feature_2368.htmlProcessing Summary:
- Weighted Batch Processing (Calibrate Only), Subframe Selector, Image Registation, Local Normalization, Image Integration, Drizzle Integration, Dynamic Crop
- Dynamic Background Extraction
- EZ Denoise
- Arcsinh Stretch (2x)
- Pixel Math: R: Ha, G: 0.4*Ha + 0.6*OIII, B: OIII
- EZ Star Reduce
- Duplicate Ha for Luminance, mask, and apply Local Histogram Equalization
- LRGBCombination to apply L to TGB image
- Curves Transformation
- Unsharp Mask
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