NGC 7662. 'The Blue Snowball'
NGC 7662 was one of the very first objects I imaged, and I've had a soft spot for it ever since.
It's a planetary nebula, and can be found in Andromeda. No-one really knows the distance, estimates vary from between 1800 and 5600 light years, making it between 0.3 and 0.8 light years across.
The dwarf star in the centre varies in magnitude between 12 and 16, and
has a surface temperature of around 75,000K. It was a tricky one...tricky
to image and tricky to process!
It's tiny, and has a very large dynamic range so while it's fairly easy
to capture the snowball itself, every other time I've tried this I've
had nothing much in the background.
There's also some interesting stuff going on in narrowband so on this
image I've used standard LRGB, plus SII,Ha and OIII data blended with
the RGB channels.
Lots of faint fuzzies starting to show in the background too!
A widefield of NGC 7662 and the surrounding starfield imaged on the 3rd
and 4th of the October 2008.
It was a horrible wet day and night, but when I went to close the bedroom
curtains at around 1am, I saw it had cleared.
The wind was howling like a banshee so tying to guide, go for long subs,
or use the 14inch was not going to work.
These are 1 minute and 2 minute unguided subs, the ones that survived
the wind!
Not my earliest, but an older version imaged with a DSI Pro 2 on 10th October 2007.
My first image of the Blue Snowball, imaged on the 20th Novenber 2006.
Click on image below for full size version
This is my highest resolution image so far of this target.
Telescope. 14 inch LX200GPS @ F10.
Exposures were 1 minute and 2 minutes for the LRGB data, and 4 minutes
for the SII,Ha and OIII. These were combined with the RGB using the Hubble
pallete of SII for Red, Ha for Green, and OIII for blue.
The 1 minute subs were for the snowball, and the 2 minute subs were for
the background.
L X 10, R X 4, G X 5, B X 4. All 1 minute unbinned.
Scope, WO ZS80FD @ F6.9.
Camera, Atik 16HR
Astronomik filters
Piggybacked onto my LX200.
Telescope. Meade LX200GPS 14" @ F10
Camera. Meade DSI Pro 2
Astronomik IR,SII,Ha & OIII filters
Autoguider-Tal 100 refractor, Meade DSI Pro, PHD Guiding.
L- 1 Minute x 16
SII- 2 minutes x 8
Ha- 2 minutes x 8
OIII- 2 minutes x 10
Telescope. 10" Meade LX200 classic, alt az mount.
Camera. Meade DSI pro1.
