NGC6164-5 Bipolar Emission Nebula in Norma

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rcj
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NGC6164-5 Bipolar Emission Nebula in Norma

Post by rcj »

Hi all!

Here is an interesting object - NGC6164-5 in Norma (NGC6164 and NGC6165 refers to each individual shell).

The object is a bipolar emission nebula. The central star (HD148937)
is extremely hot and the ultra-violet light it emits heats up the
surrounding gas. The expelled gas, guided by the magnetic field of the
star, creates the symmetric shape characteristic of a bipolar nebula.
Its distance is 4000LY away.

About the project:
This is actually quite a tough object to capture. In all, this was
taken over several nights where the transparency were average,
sometimes with thin haze present. Worse still, the mount gave problems
intermittently during tracking. This image is a resultant cumulative
work of 4 sub-exposures of 20 minutes each, hence totalling 80
minutes. The actual number of exposures were more, about 9 were
obtained (each 20 minutes long) but the best 4 were selected. The
resultant image is still quite grainy, perhaps I will try to gather
more sub exposures in time to come. You will also notice two faint
patches of wispy nebulosity on the top left and right of the bipolar
nebula, plus fainter streaks of nebulosity in the general upper
location of the image. At first I thought these were faint earth
clouds or the result of bad flats, but they are real!

Not sure if a colour image will follow by, but gonna rest up first!

Image
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Tachyon
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Post by Tachyon »

Nice image! I checked the DSS, and apparently there is a lot of nebulosity around NGC6164! Perhaps you can go deeper and see if you can capture more!

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Post by rcj »

you've read my mind! indeed there are lots of information in the region. Infact, many weeks back, i posted an image of NGC6188 (RCW108) partial mosaic, which is next to this bipolar nebula. Hopefully one day, two more mosaic frames will link NGC6188 with this nebula and an entire complete mosaic of the region can be generated. I did not want to push it too much with the stretching since it is only 4 exposures and the faint signal is very close to the background noise count profile in this region. I will try to gather more exposures tonight after my dinner appointment and weather permitting. note that this is imaging at 1000mm too, not wide field like the Digital Sky Survey....not easy to capture so much nebulosity too yeah!
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Post by rcj »

weather currently looks promising, will try more exposures of the same object again tonight...
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Post by Barry »

That is beautiful RCI! Please do it in colour. I would like to see what happens whan you combine more subs with it! It will be well worth it I think.

Well done!

Baz.
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Post by aquillae »

remus, interesting object indeed. can't wait to see the color version.
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Post by rcj »

just done a colour version.
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