October 2, 2010

Soap Bubble Nebula (9-30-2010)

Dave Jurasevich, an amateur astronomer, discovered this planetary nebula in 2008 while trying to image something else (see here). Keith Quattrocchi and and Melvin Helm found it independently a few days later (see here). It is very faint, actually, but here it is. This image is 20x8' in H-alpha and 11x8' in OIII, taken with the Atik 16, processed in Neb 2, Maxim DL 5, and PS CS3, mostly just stretched until it almost breaks. This image is black and white, inverted, and equalized in PS.

Can you see the bubble in these other iterations? The first is black and white, and the second is similar to natural color, with Ha as red.

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