NGC7027

Located in Cygnus, about 3000 light years distant, NGC7027 is a very young (600 years old) planetary nebula in an early stage of its development. It is very small, c0.1 light years in diameter, with an apparent diameter of c10 arc seconds. The first component to be formed after the Big Bang, helonium, was first detected here in 2019. It is also known as the Jewel Bug nebula.

The expanding halo surrounding NGC 7027 consists of concentric blue shells and is estimated to be about 3 times the mass of the Sun and 100 times more massive than the central region.  The core region  consists of ionised gases powered by a white dwarf star. The inner region has an irregular ellipsoidal shape with an equatorial band and high speed gas jets which give a spiky appearance.

NGC 7027 is more of an observation rather than an imaging target on SGL, I couldn’t find any other images, probably due to a combination of its small apparent size and high dynamic brightness range.

On the acquisition front, since the bright core of NGC 7027 causes my camera to operate in its non-linear region when using my standard 600s sub exposure time, I decided to also acquire a set of subs at 60s.

To render the core area I used a color corrected high dynamic range processing script from Russ Croman (https://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?threads/color-corrected-hdrmt.15769/).

The LRGB image was taken by my Esprit 150 and represents a total integration time of about 18 hours.