This picture is the results of a collaboration of
@Cyrill Durrer and myself! We distributed the acquition of channels, performed stacking subsequently and shared registration and processing to the final image.
WR 134 (or HD 191765) is a Wolf-Rayet star located at a distance of approximately 6000 Lyrs in the constellation of Cygnus. Due to the very high surface temperature of about 63000K (ten times hotter than the sun, and ~400000 times as luminous) the maximum intensity of the black body radiation is in the far UV and, therefore, its visual color after star color calibration appears slightly purple.
WR 134 is surrounded by beautiful but very faint emission nebulae. The OIII structure created by the stellar wind forms a "tattered" spherical structure around the WR star. The contrast of the ripples correspondes to a flux of about 4 photons per pixel per hour with this setup! Therefore, the contrast after 22 hours of OIII integration consists of only 100 photons difference (including photon noise standard deviation of ~sqrt(100)=10 photons). Obviously, a long exposure is mandatory.
May we ask a question to the Astrobin team (
@Salvatore Iovene) regarding the processing after upload? The calculated histogram doesn't seem to be correct for this image because it suggests strong truncation of information at the low as well as the high end in some channels which isn't actually present in our opinion.
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