NGC 7662 Blue Snowball Nebula (Molly Wakeling)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Andromeda (And) · Contains: Blue Snowball · NGC 7662 · PGC 2198265 · PGC 2200346 · PGC 2200851 · PGC 2203587 · PK106-17.1

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NGC 7662 Blue Snowball Nebula

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NGC 7662 Blue Snowball Nebula

This was a **hard** image to process!! I've been taking data since November of last year, and I've been trying to process it since February! The difference in brightness between the core and the halo was so massive that even doing several different exposure times didn't quite help.

This is NGC 7662, or the Blue Snowball Nebula. It's located in the constellation Andromeda, and it's exact distance isn't known -- it's somewhere between 2,000-6,000 lightyears away. Planetary nebulae are an end-stage for many main-sequence-type stars of about the mass of the Sun, who can no longer hold onto their gas and it gets ejected outwards. The star itself dwindles into a white dwarf.

What I wound up doing for this image after getting yucky results from HDRMultiscaleTransform in PixInsight, after HDR-compositing the different exposure times and mixing the narrowband with the color and luminance data, was to stretch the luminance and color images to three different levels before combining the L+RGB -- one to nicely show the core (which I applied HDRMultiscaleTransform to), one to nicely show the outer halo, and one that was in-between so I wouldn't have a dark ring between the core and the halo. Then I brought all three into Photoshop and used layer masks to reveal the successively brighter portions (as the less-stretched images), a technique I learned a while back for processing the Orion Nebula. I'm not in love with the result, but I think at my current skill level, it's about the best I'll be able to get out of it. I have enough data to do a better job on it when I have more experience later on.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4953928
PixInsight job	UNBB2WWH7X08U8L49PD9AC80U8JVKP7H
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	23h25m53s.292
RA (top/left)	23h26m44s.810
RA (top/right)	23h24m57s.317
RA (bottom/right)	23h25m02s.718
RA (bottom/left)	23h26m49s.170

Dec (center)	+42°32′05″.00
Dec (top/left)	+42°40′41″.13
Dec (top/right)	+42°39′31″.50
Dec (bottom/right)	+42°23′27″.58
Dec (bottom/left)	+42°24′36″.54

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NGC 7662 Blue Snowball Nebula

NGC 7662 Blue Snowball Nebula

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