Ghost of Jupiter Nebula, Lucas Magalhães

Ghost of Jupiter Nebula

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging
Ghost of Jupiter Nebula, Lucas Magalhães

Ghost of Jupiter Nebula

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

After a star like the Sun completes fusion in its core, it throws off its outer layers in a brief, beautiful cosmic display called a planetary nebula. NGC 3242 is such a planetary nebula, with the stellar remnant white dwarf star visible at the center. This nebula is sometimes called The Ghost of Jupiter for its faint, but similar appearance to our solar system's ruling gas giant planet. NGC 3242 is light-years across however, and much farther away than the measly 40 light-minutes distance to Jupiter. In fact, while watching this ghostly nebula expand over time, astronomers have estimated the distance to NGC 3242 to be about 1,400 light-years.

I had already captured this nebula, but the result was pretty bad. This time the process was with a shorter focal length and mono camera and it seems this combination worked better.The capture was lucky imaging, the same way we do for planetary images. Shooting in .SER with Shapcapture, 200ms exposure and camera gain in 480. There were 1k frames for each channel (LRGB). Then it was just stacking with AutoStakkert and processing via Pixinsight.

Comments

Histogram

Ghost of Jupiter Nebula, Lucas Magalhães