Saturday, July 24, 2010

Saturn Nebula - NGC7009

Here's a closeup of the Saturn Nebula that I took last night:


From Wikipedia:

The Saturn Nebula (also known as NGC 7009) is a planetary nebula in the Aquarius constellation. It was discovered by William Herschel on September 7, 1782 using a telescope of his own design in the garden at his home in Datchet, England and was one of his earliest discoveries in his sky survey. The nebula was originally a low-mass star that transformed into a rather bright white dwarf star, magnitude 11.5. The Saturn Nebula gets its name from its superficial resemblance to the planet Saturn with its rings nearly edge-on to the observer. It was so named by Lord Rosse in the 1840s, when telescopes had improved to the point that its Saturn-like shape could be discerned. William Henry Smyth said that the Saturn Nebula is one of Struve's 9 "Rare Celestial Objects."
The Saturn Nebula is a very complex planetary nebula and contains many morphological and kinematical sub-systems in three dimensions. It includes a halo, jet-like streams, multiple shells, ansae, and small-scale filaments and knots. The ansae are expanding non-radially from the central star.[2]
The distance to the Saturn nebula is not known very well because there are no reference stars in its neighborhood that have been detected and could be used to accurately gauge its distance. Therefore, any distance is somewhat suspect. Sabbadin et al. 2004 estimates it to be 5,200 light-years (1.6 kpc) distance from earth. In 1963, O'Dell estimated the distance to be 3,900 light-years (1.2 kpc) which gives an approximate diameter of 0.5 light years for the object as a whole.
The central star (a very hot bluish dwarf with a temperature of 55,000 K) from which the nebula is believed to originate has an absolute magnitude of +1.5 (which equates to about 20 suns luminosity and a visual magnitude of 11.5). This strong ultraviolet pounding from the central star is believed to create the characteristic fluorescent green tint of the nebula via the radiation of doubly ionized oxygen. The object overall has a visual magnitude of 8 and a radial velocity of 28 miles per second in approach.
The nebula can be spotted 1 degree west of the star Nu Aqarii. The middle central portion measures 25" X 17", whilst the outer shell extends to 30" X 26". It is a peculiarly beautiful object with a high surface brightness.

No comments:

Post a Comment