Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cygnus (Cyg)  ·  Contains:  NGC 6883

Image of the day 09/02/2021

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
    A flying bubble in Cygnus- WR 134, Jon Talbot
    A flying bubble in Cygnus- WR 134
    Powered byPixInsight

    A flying bubble in Cygnus- WR 134

    Image of the day 09/02/2021

    Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
      A flying bubble in Cygnus- WR 134, Jon Talbot
      A flying bubble in Cygnus- WR 134
      Powered byPixInsight

      A flying bubble in Cygnus- WR 134

      Equipment

      Loading...

      Acquisition details

      Loading...

      Description

      A well known target in Cygnus is the star WR-134.  Many fine images of this can be found here.  Here is my take on this fascinating target.  

      This was probably the most ambitious imaging project to date.  To make matters worse in mid/late July the western wildfire smoke finally made it to the southern US Gulf Coast and many of the Ha and OIII images were taken through this reduced transparency.  

      WR 134 is a Wolf-Rayet type star 6,000 light years distant in the constellation Cygnus which is surrounded by a faint bubble nebula created by the intense radiation and stellar winds from the star. WR134 is classified as an Algol type eclipsing variable and given the designation V1769 Cygni. The star is the whitish one near the center of the bubble. WR134 is extremely hot at 63,000K and is 400,000 times as luminous as our sun. In this image the bubble is shown in doubly ionized oxygen light (OIII) as the round blue/green area just above center. It takes on a brighter wispy look near the top and a more radiating look below that. It seems to almost form a nice circle. Other doubly ionized oxygen emission is scattered in faint streaks. Also the area is full of Hydrogen (HII) emission shown as the red clouds of gas. Two faint reflection nebula next to each other are also shown in the lower part of the image. The above image is a rotated crop of a larger field of view. The link to the uncropped and rotated image is available on my website.  The image combines 3hrs of RGB exposures and 16hrs of HII and over 20hrs of OIII exposures for a total exposure time of 47hrs. Image resolution is 1.28 arcsec/pixel.  

      Processing using PixInsight:  Starnet ++ was used to remove the stars from the stacked Ha and OIII images prior to stretching.  Both were cleaned up prior to stretching.  Both were stretched and the OIII image was taken to De Noise AI for some light de noising.  The Ha image was nearly noise free due to the increase in signal and no noise reduction was needed.  Both were combined in the HOO pallet.  The RGB image was stretched and the RGB stars were added to starless HOO image.

      Comments