Image
B Loading...
Weinberger 1-10 - Everything In Its Right Place
Weinberger 1-10 - Everything In Its Right Place
Weinberger 1-10 planetary nebula is the reason I’ve been eagerly waiting for the Swan to arrive this year.
A few words about the aesthetic features of the image:
It seems that Nature has kindly put everything in the right place around this PN to create a dramatic and beautiful effect. Hydrogen filaments look like a freeze-frame explosion emanating from a strangely flat and static plane. This static/dynamic contrast is my favorite feature of the image.
The PN itself looks like it is about to impact a lake of lava. I tried underline it by using a custom gradient map to enrich the brightest part of Ha with more yellow- to make it look “hotter”. Conversely, I didn’t push the saturation of the PN too much. Making the OIII color cold and not overly saturated contrasts it chromatically with Ha and helps to draw the eye.
Fortuitously, there is one more feature of which I knew nothing about when planning this shot. There is a very faint and slightly curved OIII arc or filament spanning most of the frame. At its apparent end is the PN itself, surrounded by even fainter OIII whisps. This arc looks like a trace left behind by the “falling” PN, although it’s not connected to it in any way. But it does lend it an impression of motion. The OIII mist lightens the image and nicely skews the red a bit towards magenta and purple around the PN.
Everything in its right place.
Annotated:
Workflow:
As is my recent habit, all the linear stage is done in Pixinsight. After stretching I exported monochrome non-linear Ha and OIII images to Photoshop. This time, however, I colorized and processed them separately and combined them near the end.
1. DrizzleIntegration x2, DropShrink 0,8
2. BlurXterminator,
3. Resample 50%, Cubic B-Spline Algorithm, Smoothness: 1,0
4. StarXterminator,
5. GradientCorrection
6. NoiseXterminator,
7. StatisticalStretch, Median: 0,1, no normalization.
8. Ha i OIII colorized in PS, Ha with dual-color Gradient Map, OIII with Hue/Saturation with the “Colorize” option checked.
9. TopazDenoise on darkest parts of Ha and OIII with masks - no “AI sharpening”.
10. Worked on colors, contrasts, details etc.
11. OIII screened on top of Ha.
12. Some final corrections, tweaks to color, contrast, saturation.
13. Stars made from Ha and OIII in Pix (R = Ha, G = 0,8 OIII + 0,2 Ha, B = OIII), stretched with GHS and screened in PS.
14. Resize 66%, saved as PNG.
A few words about We 1-10 (ok…. more than a few)
Also known as W 1-10, We 1-10, Weinberger 1-10, PK 086+05.1, PN G086.1+5.4.
DISCOVERY.
Discovered by Ronald Weinberger in 1977 on Palomar Sky Survey photographic plates, along with eleven other nebulae he lends his name to. Weinberger published those discoveries in "New planetary nebulae of low surface brightness", Astron. Astrophys. Suppl. 30, 343-348 (1977).
This is how it looks on those plates:
BASIC ASTROMETRIC DATA
Apparent size: 194 x 187 arcseconds.
Brightness: 24 mag.
Distance: c-ca 5100 light years / 1585 parsecs, calculated from the parallax value of its central star (CSPN) – 0,309 milliseconds of arc / year.
TRUE SIZE
It can be calculated with the following formula:
(apparent size in arcseconds / 206,265) = (true size in parsecs / distance in parsecs)
(190 as / 206,265) = X / 1585
X = (190 x 1585) / 206,265
X = 1,46 parsecs
X = 1,46 parsecs * 3,26 = 4,76 light years.
It’s big for a PN, which typically measure around 1 ly in diameter – although it’s highly dependent on their age, since the shell is continuously expanding. Simplifying it greatly – the older it is, the bigger and, usually, fainter it gets. This one isn’t terribly faint, though.
“Properties of central stars of planetary nebulae with distances in Gaia DR2” Gonzalez-Santamaria et al., https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201936162 seems to confirm my conclusions. Authors mention this particular PN, noting that it’s very large and that its expansion velocity isn’t that high. Thus, it’s kinematic age has a large value.
CENTRAL STAR (CSPN)
CSPN is Gaia DR3 2179832585761932032 - https://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=Gaia%20DR3%202179832585761932032&NbIdent=1
Here is the image from DSS Color – it’s very tiny and very blue:
Further data and diagram from “Properties of central stars of planetary nebulae with distances in Gaia DR2”:
According to the paper, this may be explained by the “born-again PN” phenomenon, since the temperature and luminosity value of this CSPN fit well with stars that have undergone late helium burning.
A star, like our Sun, after consuming most of its hydrogen fuel and fusing it to helium and later that helium to carbon and oxygen, will swell in size and become a red giant. At this stage it will lose nearly half of its mass in stellar winds. Subsequently, a very hot and small stellar remnant will ionize this gas, creating a planetary nebula.
Sometimes however, helium fusion resumes, resulting in a “born-again” episode.
When a star leaves the asymptotic giant branch of the HR diagram, it has a carbon-oxygen core surrounded by helium with an outer shell of hydrogen. If the helium ignites, the star very briefly (for ~200 years) becomes a giant again, developing strong stellar winds and emitting a lot of energy. After fusion ceases, it quickly heads towards the white dwarf/subdwarf stage. However, such a white dwarf is strongly hydrogen-deficient and resides outside the main evolutionary path of the HR diagram.
Another probable case of “born-again PN” is Moth-Werner-Pakull 1 – MWP1, also in Cygnus, which I photographed last year.
STRUCTURE
To my knowledge, there are no publications dedicated to this PN specifically. So, I’ll do my best to describe some features and speculate a bit.
This PN is very nearly spherical. Both Ha and OIII shells have few deformations or discontinuities. One major difference is that the Ha shell is just that- a mostly empty bubble, very reminiscent of PN G75.5+1.7 (“Soap Bubble Nebula”, also in Cygnus, also in my gallery). Oxygen III presents a somewhat different picture- more reminiscent of Abell 6, where the shell is thicker and/or partially filled with ionized gas. Also, this PN is much brighter in OIII than in Ha.
Clean H-alpha image:
Annotated Ha image:
Annotated OIII image:
To sum up, this nebula, considering its age, probably interacts with the interstellar medium to some extent, which should influence its morphology. We should however bear in mind that its central star probably had a complex evolutionary path (AGB -> post-AGB -> late/very late thermal flash -> AGB -> white dwarf) instead of just going from AGB to white dwarf. That would also be reflected in the nebular structure.
A few words about the aesthetic features of the image:
It seems that Nature has kindly put everything in the right place around this PN to create a dramatic and beautiful effect. Hydrogen filaments look like a freeze-frame explosion emanating from a strangely flat and static plane. This static/dynamic contrast is my favorite feature of the image.
The PN itself looks like it is about to impact a lake of lava. I tried underline it by using a custom gradient map to enrich the brightest part of Ha with more yellow- to make it look “hotter”. Conversely, I didn’t push the saturation of the PN too much. Making the OIII color cold and not overly saturated contrasts it chromatically with Ha and helps to draw the eye.
Fortuitously, there is one more feature of which I knew nothing about when planning this shot. There is a very faint and slightly curved OIII arc or filament spanning most of the frame. At its apparent end is the PN itself, surrounded by even fainter OIII whisps. This arc looks like a trace left behind by the “falling” PN, although it’s not connected to it in any way. But it does lend it an impression of motion. The OIII mist lightens the image and nicely skews the red a bit towards magenta and purple around the PN.
Everything in its right place.
Annotated:
Workflow:
As is my recent habit, all the linear stage is done in Pixinsight. After stretching I exported monochrome non-linear Ha and OIII images to Photoshop. This time, however, I colorized and processed them separately and combined them near the end.
1. DrizzleIntegration x2, DropShrink 0,8
2. BlurXterminator,
3. Resample 50%, Cubic B-Spline Algorithm, Smoothness: 1,0
4. StarXterminator,
5. GradientCorrection
6. NoiseXterminator,
7. StatisticalStretch, Median: 0,1, no normalization.
8. Ha i OIII colorized in PS, Ha with dual-color Gradient Map, OIII with Hue/Saturation with the “Colorize” option checked.
9. TopazDenoise on darkest parts of Ha and OIII with masks - no “AI sharpening”.
10. Worked on colors, contrasts, details etc.
11. OIII screened on top of Ha.
12. Some final corrections, tweaks to color, contrast, saturation.
13. Stars made from Ha and OIII in Pix (R = Ha, G = 0,8 OIII + 0,2 Ha, B = OIII), stretched with GHS and screened in PS.
14. Resize 66%, saved as PNG.
A few words about We 1-10 (ok…. more than a few)
Also known as W 1-10, We 1-10, Weinberger 1-10, PK 086+05.1, PN G086.1+5.4.
DISCOVERY.
Discovered by Ronald Weinberger in 1977 on Palomar Sky Survey photographic plates, along with eleven other nebulae he lends his name to. Weinberger published those discoveries in "New planetary nebulae of low surface brightness", Astron. Astrophys. Suppl. 30, 343-348 (1977).
This is how it looks on those plates:
BASIC ASTROMETRIC DATA
Apparent size: 194 x 187 arcseconds.
Brightness: 24 mag.
Distance: c-ca 5100 light years / 1585 parsecs, calculated from the parallax value of its central star (CSPN) – 0,309 milliseconds of arc / year.
TRUE SIZE
It can be calculated with the following formula:
(apparent size in arcseconds / 206,265) = (true size in parsecs / distance in parsecs)
(190 as / 206,265) = X / 1585
X = (190 x 1585) / 206,265
X = 1,46 parsecs
X = 1,46 parsecs * 3,26 = 4,76 light years.
It’s big for a PN, which typically measure around 1 ly in diameter – although it’s highly dependent on their age, since the shell is continuously expanding. Simplifying it greatly – the older it is, the bigger and, usually, fainter it gets. This one isn’t terribly faint, though.
“Properties of central stars of planetary nebulae with distances in Gaia DR2” Gonzalez-Santamaria et al., https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201936162 seems to confirm my conclusions. Authors mention this particular PN, noting that it’s very large and that its expansion velocity isn’t that high. Thus, it’s kinematic age has a large value.
CENTRAL STAR (CSPN)
CSPN is Gaia DR3 2179832585761932032 - https://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=Gaia%20DR3%202179832585761932032&NbIdent=1
Here is the image from DSS Color – it’s very tiny and very blue:
Further data and diagram from “Properties of central stars of planetary nebulae with distances in Gaia DR2”:
- Evolutionary age: 409 367 years
- Mass: 0.5319 Ms
- Temperature Teff: 58 000 K
According to the paper, this may be explained by the “born-again PN” phenomenon, since the temperature and luminosity value of this CSPN fit well with stars that have undergone late helium burning.
A star, like our Sun, after consuming most of its hydrogen fuel and fusing it to helium and later that helium to carbon and oxygen, will swell in size and become a red giant. At this stage it will lose nearly half of its mass in stellar winds. Subsequently, a very hot and small stellar remnant will ionize this gas, creating a planetary nebula.
Sometimes however, helium fusion resumes, resulting in a “born-again” episode.
When a star leaves the asymptotic giant branch of the HR diagram, it has a carbon-oxygen core surrounded by helium with an outer shell of hydrogen. If the helium ignites, the star very briefly (for ~200 years) becomes a giant again, developing strong stellar winds and emitting a lot of energy. After fusion ceases, it quickly heads towards the white dwarf/subdwarf stage. However, such a white dwarf is strongly hydrogen-deficient and resides outside the main evolutionary path of the HR diagram.
Another probable case of “born-again PN” is Moth-Werner-Pakull 1 – MWP1, also in Cygnus, which I photographed last year.
STRUCTURE
To my knowledge, there are no publications dedicated to this PN specifically. So, I’ll do my best to describe some features and speculate a bit.
This PN is very nearly spherical. Both Ha and OIII shells have few deformations or discontinuities. One major difference is that the Ha shell is just that- a mostly empty bubble, very reminiscent of PN G75.5+1.7 (“Soap Bubble Nebula”, also in Cygnus, also in my gallery). Oxygen III presents a somewhat different picture- more reminiscent of Abell 6, where the shell is thicker and/or partially filled with ionized gas. Also, this PN is much brighter in OIII than in Ha.
Clean H-alpha image:
Annotated Ha image:
- Red arrow – let’s call it a lump. Also visible in OIII. I don’t know the origin of this feature. Possibly a beginning of bipolarity that never progressed further.
- Green arrow – there’s a very apparent brightening of the shell here. In fact, this is the brightest part of the nebula, both in Ha and in OIII. This is the densest and/or the hottest part of the shell.
- Yellow arrow and line – what looks like turbulent flow along the boundary. It may indicate interactions with something. Whether with the interstellar medium or other older nebular material on the outside or younger gas inside the shell – I do not know.
Annotated OIII image:
- Red arrow – the lump.
- Yellow lines and arrows – another, fainter OIII shell/halo. Most probably an element of the PN. Being outside, it is older than the main shell and it seems to surround most of it. Separated by clear discontinuity. There are other PNe that manifest this feature, like HFG1 or HDW2/ Sh2-200 (both in my gallery). In the case of HFG1 it’s the result of interaction with the interstellar medium, through which the PN moves supersonically. We 1-10 remains basically unresearched, so it’s hard to tell how this outer layer formed.
- Green arrow – brightest spot, just like in Ha.
- Blue lines – maybe a short OIII tail, if the PN moves with some velocity through the surrounding medium? That could explain the outer, discontinuous shell. This is, however, pure speculation. The supposed tail may just be foreground or background OIII not connected to the PN in any way.
To sum up, this nebula, considering its age, probably interacts with the interstellar medium to some extent, which should influence its morphology. We should however bear in mind that its central star probably had a complex evolutionary path (AGB -> post-AGB -> late/very late thermal flash -> AGB -> white dwarf) instead of just going from AGB to white dwarf. That would also be reflected in the nebular structure.
Loading...