NGC 6164: The Precious Dragon Egg: An HOO+RGB Rendition

by Ani Shastry

Objects in field: NGC 6164, NGC 6165

Equipment: Planewave CDK24, Moravian Instruments C5A-100M

Integration: 24h 48m

NGC 6164 is one of the strangest and most beautiful objects in the southern sky, a rare bipolar nebula in Ara/Norma known as the Dragon’s Egg. At its heart burns HD 148937, a massive O type star some 4,200 light years away, shining with the light of hundreds of thousands of Suns. Stars like this almost never form nebulae of such delicate symmetry, and that is precisely the mystery. The glowing…