Planetary Nebula Abell 30

[iansmith]

Hello,

This is my attempt at the planetary nebula Abell 30. This object lies approx 5500 light years away in the constellation of Cancer. It is of interest to astronomers as it is a rare example of a planetary nebula where the central star as become a red giant for the second time and gone through the whole process of forming a planetary nebula again. For us imagers it has lots going on inside the nice spherical shell of mostly hydrogen gas (here coloured a sort of reddish brown colour). The knots and arcs inside the shell only show up in the O3 band so I've given them a blue colour. I think it is fair to say that they are material from the second generation PN interacting with material from the first.

This image has been something of a labour of love to capture. The surrounding stars are very faint (magnitudes 12 to 13 I think) which made it hard for the FocusLock software to keep proper focus so I had to do it manually. There was also a large gap thanks to the rubbish weather we all appear to have had during March.

The nebula image is a mixture of Ha and O3 while the stars are RGB taken with an Edge HD11 and Atik 414EX on a Mesu 200. Guided via ONAG and Ultrastar. Capture details: 24x900s for the 3nm Ha and 3nm O3 filters, 12x300s for the red, green and blue filters, all at 2x2 binning. The nebula data was combined to produce a colour image using 100% Ha for the red channel, 30% Ha and 70% O3 for green channel and 100% O3 for the blue channel. It was all processed using PixInsight.

I hope you like it, as always comments and criticisms welcomed.

Cheers, Ian.

[DaveS]

Very interesting.

Anyone else think the central [OIII] structures look like a spider?

[Demonperformer]

Great detail of a lovely planetary, Ian. Nice one.

[Star101]

Very interesting image. 

Yeah, I think it looks like an embryo with some strands of DNA ( Or a Spider ) floating around inside lol.

I also thing its a great image. 

Thanks for sharing.

[Craney]

16 minutes ago, DaveS said:

Anyone else think the central [OIII] structures look like a spider?

.... indeed.... I thought of the face hugger in Alien.....  just about to eject out of its pod.....  

[iansmith]

Thanks for all the comments. My other half sees a butterfly

Cheers, Ian

[Hallingskies]

An outstanding effort for an object well off the beaten track.  That Mesu mount must be a beast to allow you to image and guide so well at the native focal length of a C11.

[StargeezerTim]

Thats spooky!

[iansmith]

9 hours ago, Hallingskies said:

An outstanding effort for an object well off the beaten track.  That Mesu mount must be a beast to allow you to image and guide so well at the native focal length of a C11.

Thanks Halllingskies. The Mesu is one of the best bits of astro kit I've ever bought. 

7 hours ago, StargeezerTim said:

Thats spooky!

It does look like an alien monster trying to climb out doesn't it?

Cheers, Ian