Amateur astrophotographer Emil Andronic has captured a striking image of the Cat’s Eye Nebula from his home in Hertfordshire, United Kingdom, showcasing the tenuous outer structure of the famous deep-sky object.
The Cat’s Eye Nebula, also known as NGC6543, formed when an aging sun-like star cast its outer layers into space, forming a dense central cocoon of dust surrounded by a diffuse veil of stellar material.
In Andronic‘s portrait of the iconic nebula, the gaseous outer layers look like a raindrop breaking the surface of a vast cosmic pond. The dense central region — a strange melding of concentric bubbles and chaotic dusty structures imaged by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope — can also be spotted shining brightly at the heart of the image.
The next several thousand years will see the nebula disperse, according to NASA, as radiation pouring out from the central dying star pushes the material ever outward into interstellar space.
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“To get to this result, I kept shooting, stacking, shooting and stacking again, until I felt that I had enough data,” Andronic said in an email to Space.com. It took the amateur astronomer over 65 hours to image the Cat’s Eye nebula using a trio of telescopes aided by a host of peripherals, filters and cooled astronomy cameras from March 29 to April 17 of this year.
“It’s a really tough nut to crack with the core being extremely bright,” explained Andronic. “Because of how bright it is and the fact that I’m using a Newtonian, it made 4 thick diffraction spikes around it.”
Diffraction spikes are the long lines that can often be seen extending from stars in astronomy photos, which often form when light has to bend around a support beam when entering a telescope, according to Celestron. Andronic was able to negotiate the problem by shooting shorter exposures and blending old data on the bright center with newer observations using the astrophotography software Pixinsight in conjunction with Adobe Photoshop.
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