Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cassiopeia (Cas)
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
JWST Cassiopiea A, Chris Ashford
JWST Cassiopiea A
Powered byPixInsight

JWST Cassiopiea A

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
JWST Cassiopiea A, Chris Ashford
JWST Cassiopiea A
Powered byPixInsight

JWST Cassiopiea A

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

This image uses narrowband NIRCAM images made by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. The data were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-03127 for JWST.

Images used were from the following NIRCAM filters:
F150W
F356W
F444W

I was practicing NB image processing today since the weather has been awful and I didn't have any of my own data. It's an amazing image with a scale of 0.063 arcseconds per pixel, and if you look carefully, you'll see a lot of galaxies in the background. The stringy-looking artifacts, especially visible on the on the left-hand side of the image, are light echoes of supernova emissions that have been absorbed and reprocessed as infra-red light by surrounding interstellar material. The large structure at the top left even has a name: "Baby Cas A".

Wikipedia - Cassiopeia A (Cas A) (listen) is a supernova remnant (SNR) in the constellation Cassiopeia and the brightest extrasolar radio source in the sky at frequencies above 1 GHz. The supernova occurred approximately 11,000 light-years (3.4 kpc) away within the Milky Way;[2][3] given the width of the Orion Arm, it lies in the next-nearest arm outwards, the Perseus Arm, about 30 degrees from the Galactic anticenter.

It is estimated that light from the supernova itself first reached Earth near the 1690s, although there are no definitively corresponding records from then. Cas A is circumpolar at and above mid-Northern latitudes which had extensive records and basic telescopes. Its likely omission in records is probably due to interstellar dust absorbing optical wavelength radiation before it reached Earth, although it is possible that it was recorded as a sixth magnitude star 3 Cassiopeiae by John Flamsteed. Possible explanations lean toward the idea that the source star was unusually massive and had previously ejected much of its outer layers. These outer layers would have cloaked the star and absorbed much of the visible-light emission as the inner star collapsed.

Comments

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

JWST Cassiopiea A, Chris Ashford