NGC 1514 "Crystal Ball Nebula" (Bill McLaughlin)

NGC 1514 "Crystal Ball Nebula"

Discovered by William Herschel in 1790, NGC 1514, also called the "Crystal Ball Nebula", is about 1500 light years away. It is relatively bright at magnitude 9.27 and it's on sky size is about one arc minute with a fainter halo extending to about a minute and a half of arc. The inner shell appears distorted although may have originally been round. There is a large area of dust surrounding the nebula. The giant visible central star is not actually the one generating the illuminating radiation. That is coming from a hot sub-luminous companion orbiting the visible giant with an orbital period of close to 9 years, one of the longest known for any planetary nebula.

Taken over 15 nights between October 6th and December 5th 2024 from Skies Away Observatory in California.

I tried a couple new pieces of software for this image in addition to Pixinsight. These were Imagenomic Noiseware 6 and Topaz Gigapixel (set to Non-AI). There was some modest improvement in noise and detail as a result.

A paper discussing the long period binary central stars for this nebula as well as LoTR 5

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Title: NGC 1514 "Crystal Ball Nebula"

Description: Discovered by William Herschel in 1790, NGC 1514, also called the "Crystal Ball Nebula", is about 1500 light years away. It is relatively bright at magnitude 9.27 and it's on sky size is about one arc minute with a fainter halo extending to about a minute and a half of arc. The inner shell appears distorted although may have originally been round. There is a large area of dust surrounding the nebula. The giant visible central star is not actually the one generating the illuminating radiation. That is coming from a hot sub-luminous companion orbiting the visible giant with an orbital period of close to 9 years, one of the longest known for any planetary nebula.

Taken over 15 nights between October 6th and December 5th 2024 from Skies Away Observatory in California.

I tried a couple new pieces of software for this image in addition to Pixinsight. These were Imagenomic Noiseware 6 and Topaz Gigapixel (set to Non-AI). There was some modest improvement in noise and detail as a result.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
PixInsight job	O2QRRWWVTU8KW3NFSL2ERST7P40EU6D6
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	04h09m15s.613
RA (top/left)	04h10m02s.426
RA (top/right)	04h08m28s.892
RA (bottom/right)	04h08m28s.975
RA (bottom/left)	04h10m02s.179

Dec (center)	+30°46′26″.85
Dec (top/left)	+30°56′25″.64
Dec (top/right)	+30°56′26″.58
Dec (bottom/right)	+30°36′26″.33
Dec (bottom/left)	+30°36′25″.23

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