“Floating on a fuming lake,
In the celestial cauldron boil and bake;
Hydrogen and oxygen, sulfur and more,
Energized from a stellar core,
Ionized gases, swirling bright,
Hot young star, burn, ignite,
For a charm of cosmic trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble."What prophecy might the witches stirring this elemental soup in its cosmic cauldron make? Something wicked indeed: There is no double-meaning here, as the fate of BD +602522 is sealed. The star is condemned to a short but brilliant life (sort of like a candle in the wind
). Astronomers believe that this 4-million-year-old star will be around for another 10 to 20 million years, ultimately burning out in the most dramatic way possible for a star: supernova.
NGC 7635 in the constellation Cassiopeia is an emission nebula surrounding this over-achiever star about 7,100 light years away. It's known as the Bubble Nebula -- and it is literally a "bubble" of expanding gases. BD +602522 is a hot, massive star (45 times larger than our sun), whose stellar winds have triggered an expanding shockwave that formed the shell of the bubble. The Bubble Nebula itself is 7 light-years in diameter. The blue light within and around the shell is from super-heated Oxygen ignited by the star that powers the stellar tempest -- a gale-force windstorm growing outward at over 6 million kilometers per hour.
This image is the result of about 21 hours of narrowband data, captured over 10 nights between November 22 and December 23. Most nights I only captured an hour or two of data, while waiting for other targets to rise high enough. Not all of the data was great quality -- most of it was taken from my Bortle 7+ location (except one night in Santa Ysabel, Bortle 4ish), there were some nights where high-altitude clouds may have gone by unnoticed by me, or where my focus was not perfect. 72 frames were rejected (about 3.6 hours total).
I processed this with Russel Croman's BlurXterminator and EZ Denoise, then combined the Ha, Oiii, and Sii masters with the Forax technique of mapping the NB channels in Pixelmath:
https://thecoldestnights.com/2020/06/pixinsight-dynamic-narrowband-combinations-with-pixelmath/I then split the Pixelmath output to RGB and recombined with Ha as Luminance. Fiddled with curves, some minimal post-processing in Topaz Denoise and Photoshop.
Thanks for looking!
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