NGC 1514 "A most singular phaenomenon"

[gorann]

NGC 1514 is a planetary nebula that was discovered by William Herschel on November 13, 1790, describing it "A most singular phaenomenon" and forcing him to rethink his ideas on the construction of the heavens. Up until this point Herschel was convinced that all nebulae consisted of masses of stars too remote to resolve, but now here was a single star "surrounded with a faintly luminous atmosphere." He went on to conclude "Our judgement I may venture to say, will be, that the nebulosity about the star is not of a starry nature".

It has since been conjectured that the nebula in fact envelops a tightly orbiting double star with a period of up to 10 days. Gas is presumably expanding away from the larger star of the pair. (All according to Wikipedia)

I have spared SGL the last galaxies I processed from Liverpool Telescope data (posted in my Astrobin album), but then I found this nebula in the LT data and thought it may be worth posting. There are some nebulosity next to it and in the orientation of the image that I had while working on it, that nebulosity was to the left and rather disturbing. However, after turning the image so the nebulosity fell below the nebula it kind of gives a nice reflection as if the nebula hovers above a cosmic ocean (yes, I had a beer just now....).

Here are the filters and exposures:

Bessell B 22 x 90 s (blue channel)

Bessell V 23 x 90 s (green channel)

sdss-r 23 x 90 s (red channel)

Ha 8 x 120 s (mixed 30% into the red channel)

So about 2 hours of data from this 2 m RC scope on La Palma. Stacked in Nebulosity 4 and processed in PS CS5

Comments most welcome

[MarsG76]

Imagine the dark skies that he would have been privileged to...

[wimvb]

Nice change of subject (= galaxies). I agree that this orientation works better than the original.

It seems that the Ha didn't add much to the final result.

[gorann]

30 minutes ago, wimvb said:

Nice change of subject (= galaxies). I agree that this orientation works better than the original.

It seems that the Ha didn't add much to the final result.

No, not much specific Ha in this object apparently. Looks the same is most other images I have seen on the net. A very bluish nebula. Still, there is Ha signal but it is overwhelmed by the blue. This is what the "raw" Ha data looks like in an extreme stretch (using the equalize command in PS)

[RichLD]

Very cool image - thanks for sharing!

[wimvb]

I saw the same in ngc 7094, another blue pn. I think that the Ha just picked up red broad band signal, so I never put it in.

[gorann]

18 minutes ago, wimvb said:

I saw the same in ngc 7094, another blue pn. I think that the Ha just picked up red broad band signal, so I never put it in.

But actually Wim, your remark got me into looking more carefully at the Ha data and when stretching it carefully it held a bit more detail of the nebula than the blue signal so I have now added it as a lum layer to the nebula to bring out a bit more detail. Here is the results. Maybe a subtle difference but it is there. Somehow Ha is really great at piking up details, maybe by getting through out atmosphere a bit better than blue.