More Backyard Astronomy 9/26/2020. Great Gadzooks! I caught a snapshot of a dwarf star exploding! Before you get too excited about it, the explosion occurred somewhere between 9,800 to 16,000 years ago way off in the northern constellation of Vulpecula, the "Little Fox" in Latin. The shockwave of hot gases are expanding in all directions forming this glass globe appearance, with Mickey Mouse ears from secondary explosions. The shockwave is moving at the speed of 15 - 35 miles a second! At that speed the gas would move from the East coast to the West coast of the United States in just 76 seconds.

This is a photo of a planetary nebula. It looks like a planet. My photograph shows how the planetary nebula appeared more than 1,200 years ago as it has taken that long for the image, traveling at the speed of light, to land on my camera sensor. Charles Messier discovered this planetary nebula back in 1764 a few years before the revolutionary war. The view of it hasn't changed that much from the present view in my picture. This heavenly object was number 27 in his catalogue of things in the sky that were not comets, and not worth wasting time on. It was the first planetary nebula that he discovered, and he numbered it as Messier 27, M27 for short. It's called the Dumbbell Nebula for dumbbells like me. It is also known as the Apple Core Nebula due to its greenish tint caused by the presence of doubly ionized oxygen.

I actually took this photograph with an Oxygen III and Hydrogen A and B filter to bring out more detail in the nebula. The photo is a two hour exposure taken with my cooled astro camera at 27 degrees below freezing. The low temperature helps keeps an electronic fog out of my photo during these long exposures. The fog is caused by electronic noise and heat from the camera sensor.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this photograph. Clear skies to you- Ken Adler-