Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cygnus (Cyg)  ·  Contains:  28 Cyg  ·  NGC 6883  ·  The star b2 Cyg
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WR 134, Jeff Rothstein
WR 134
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WR 134

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
WR 134, Jeff Rothstein
WR 134
Powered byPixInsight

WR 134

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Description

Last summer I spent a great deal of time both capturing and processing an image of the Dolphin Head Nebula, Sh2-308, which was produced by a Wolf-Rayet star.  That sparked an interest in other Wolf-Rayet nebulae.  Here is the nebula produces by WR 134 in Cygnus.   Wolf-Rayet stars are many times more massive and thousands of times brighter than the Sun.  They live fast and die young, in as little as a few million years, and they are believed to end with a bang--a supernova.  Compare that to our Sun, which will live for 9-10 billion years.

The bright blue on the left limb was fairly easy to capture, but bringing out the entire circle of the W-R nebula was challenging.  In fact, I couldn't get a satisfactory image with a traditional red-blue palette in PixInsight, so I turned to Paulyman Astro's wonderful video that describes his Foraxx palette workflow.  This represents my first attempt using that palette, and it certainly produces dramatic images.  More to the point for this project, it retained almost all of the blue sphere of gas emanating from the Wolf-Rayet star (the white one nearly dead-center in the image).

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WR 134, Jeff Rothstein